Comments on: Metadata is Censorship � Open-Source is the New Regulation

By: Max Starkenburg

Max Starkenburg — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 23:34:12 +0000

Unlike the cancer cure example, Google per se does not directly cure diseases or save lives, so I would think the ethics would be different, but I don’t know much about ethics. But how about instead of trying to regulate a private corporation, advocating the creation of a public Department of Internet Search that would be charged with creating the biggest and badest search engine ever and would be funded by enough tax dollars to compete for the best and brightest at Google. Sort of like how people are now trying to travel to space with private money based on technology originally developed at NASA with public money, but in reverse. And it would also, if only under the Freedom of Information Act, be open source. Of course, people would start complaining when taxpayer-funded servers start caching porn and such. And maybe changes could only be made to it via voting for lawmakers and presidents instead of committing CVS patches or whatever. But those are small details. ;-)

Oops, I wrote all this before reading your last paragraph. Damn. Anyway, in response to your penultimate paragraph, I don’t think people at Google really care all that much about creating a place for their company in the history books, unless doing so will also help them put food on the table, or buy new Lexuses, or whatever example you want to use.

I think you’re giving them too much credit. After all, they only came into popularity (maybe that’s a key word, here, as opposed to ones you use, such as monopoly and censorship) a few years ago, and we all lived fine before them. Maybe life wasn’t as good, but it was still fine. We could still do things like vote (well, most of us), work on projects such as Lucene, as suggested above, and there was still no cure for cancer.

By: Ryan Clark

Ryan Clark — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 03:33:50 +0000

I would love to see them open their source, mind you, but I wouldn’t like to see them forced to open it. Their right to publish shouldn’t be contingent on anything else.

By: Ryan Clark

Ryan Clark — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 03:26:49 +0000

Google publishes human-readable words on a website. That’s all they do. Their only “product” is written speech.

Speech-production is an activity I’d not like to see regulated.

By: Will

Will — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 02:49:28 +0000

P.S. at the end of the episode you get beaten up, driven out of the village and left for dead. Sorry, that’s just the way it goes. Give up now and our primitive asses might spare you and even give you one of our daughters as a wife. Your kid’s face will only be about half as fucked up as hers. But he will also be a total weener.

By: Will

Will — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 02:43:46 +0000

You are like an officer from the Enterprise who has beamed down to a planet with some less advanced people to try to convince them that they need to evacuate their village. You are all like, trying not to violate the prime directive by revealing information that could fuck with their natural development, and that makes it hard to get the job done. You’ll all be like “well, there are problems that I can’t explain” and they are like “but the goddess bishtoog has never failed us before!”

By: Jordan

Jordan — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 04:57:03 +0000

Yes, in a perfect Marxist world Google would be open source. Unfortunately, in this hypothetical world Google may not exist because Larry Page still needs a way to put food on his hypothetical table.

Google is a good company - they provide services that play nicely with others. The real sign of a monopoly is that they use their power in one market to unfairly influence another. I have not (yet, perhaps, is a valid argument) seen this happening. Until that happens, leave the DOJ out of this. No one is going to influence Google’s policies by finger waving.

There are many alternative searches that I use regularly, staying clear of Google; examples being Technorati and WikiPedia. I use them because the results I get there are more relevant; the data is organized better for the search I am trying to do. Google will not always be the be all end all. Intregrating Google Maps may kill Mapquest, but lets face it, Google Maps is better to begin with.

If you are interested in open source search, I suggest you check out Lucene: http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/index.html. Google isn’t keeping you from working on it.

By: Alex C

Alex C — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 17:30:05 +0000

Google is not going to open source their search indexing code for the reason that it will make it even easier for people to game the system and boost their page’s search engine ranking on Google.

You raise the idea that any information filtering will be inherently biased, but this is how it’s always been. The editors of the 1905 Encyclopedia Brittanica chose what topics to include articles on, and edited those articles to suit their tastes. Their has to be some kind of default ‘Lens’ to view internet search engine result. Whatever minor biases Google’s might have (you can’t seem to come up with any good examples) aren’t really that important, because with the right search criteria you should still be able to zero in on what you need.