Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Google Gives Up On Search

I think this story is really important.

As Google adapt their search engine to be more personal and more real-time popularity contest, we see the accelerating rise of Netocratic epistemology. Remember, under Netocracy, the idea of a cannon of commonly accepted knowledge collapses into ever changing flows of hot-ideas. The search engines came in, promising to put all human knowledge at our finger tips, but what happens when they decide that filter bubbles sell better than "objective facts" and they've already put the rival institutions such as libraries out of business?

1 comment:

John Powers said...

I also think this is really important.

For a couple of years I used Clusty before Vivisimo sold the search engine to a firm that sort of creates a Christian worldview portal to the Internet.

I don't really dislike personal results, but they're just one sort of "cluster" of results which might be useful to me.

"Objective facts" depend on communities of practice. Results from our online networks are indeed relevant to me. But other lens with which to view search results could be too.

My sense is that Google could become more useful to me by doing something like Clusty did by providing various ways to sort results into clusters.