Google Bias?
Google’s Bias for Bigness. By Kelly Hearn, AlterNet, July 14, 2005.
Many of us rely on Google daily and marvel at how well it ranks web pages and even long for library indexing to do as well. By definition, Google ranks popular pages (as measured by links to them) higher than less popular pages. But frequent Google users know that “popularity” does not always equal “quality” or even “what we need.”
Because Google guards its algorithms closely, we can only judge its accuracy indirectly by evaluating results and comparing rankings.
In that context, this article about Google news ranking provides some useful speculation and insights into our reliance on search engines.
The upshot is that Google’s proposed change isn’t just a misguided and disheartening quest to mainstream online news. It’s a demoralizing metamorphosis from a catch-all (mostly) uncensored news aggregator with egalitarian undertones to a purveyor of corporate-driven coverage suitable only for what Lawrence Weschler, formerly of the New Yorker, calls the “temporal frenzy that has come to characterize the increasingly peg-driven, niche-slotted, attention-squeezed, sound-bite media environment of recent years.”