|
By Sanjay Iyer On the World Wide Web, Google is God. It is incredibly efficient at analysing web information and serving up the most relevant pages. But increasingly, there are whispers of Google's arbitrariness, its inherent bias towards big players, its arch-conservatism and its monopoly over Internet information dissemination
If you type the phrase 'Indian democracy' in the Internet search engine Google, and click on the 'I'm feeling lucky' button, you might expect a lesson in civics from the National Informatics Centre (NICnet). That is not what you will get. A discussion forum on the remarkable results of the recent elections, then? No, again. Instead, you will be instantly transported to a website called holocaustinkashmir.com whose author ('Asif') has diligently compiled a track record of rights abuses by the Indian military. The 'I'm feeling lucky' icon takes you straight to the topmost listing in Google's search. So how did Asif get there? For those not yet in the know, this is a classic Google bomb. A Google bomb explodes when several players collude to link a certain search string (like 'Indian democracy') to a chosen website. There are other more internationally famous Google bombs on the net these days. The phrase 'miserable failure' links to the preening, self-important official White House George W Bush page. Even more hilarious is what happens with 'weapons of mass destruction'. A page that is a facsimile of the Google search failure appears, except it says, "The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable- and, "Click the Regime Change button, or try again later." A vast majority of us have come to be dependent on Google. It is incredibly efficient at analysing web information and serving up the most relevant pages, all in an instant. The story of Google is also a breath of inspirational fresh air compared to the petulant (and flatulent) posturings of Microsoft. Two Stanford nerds, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, while still graduate students, developed a set of algorithms that sparked a quantum leap in search technology. It was a no-frills, just-the-facts software that empowered all of us on the World Wide Web. We all switched to Google. We like Google not only because it will return millions of pages when you type in ' India development issues' but because the most relevant pages are close to the top ( www.infochangeindia.org shows up on the first page of the search results). So then, what do we make of the fact that a site like holocaustinkashmir.com has gatecrashed to the top of the charts in a search for 'Indian democracy'? The simple answer is that there are ways to manipulate Google. Google essentially works on a democratic voting system called PageRank. Every link from one site to another is like a vote. The more votes a site gets, the more it moves up on the 'quality' scale, and consequently gets more weighted in Google influence. Basically, the pages that Google says are the most relevant are the pages that the entire Web says are the most relevant. This is the crux of Google's problem. Once people see a voting system, they will attempt to manipulate it. Every ill that one hears about in Bihar 's electoral practice has its counterpart in Google - people voting many times, people voting by proxy, dead people showing up on the rolls, and so on. Voting is only one of the factors that go into determining Google's search result order, but it is an important factor, and the one that is most frequently exploited by 'search engine optimisers'. Or, if you prefer, 'index spammers'. Spamming is a threat that is 'ongoing and increasing' (Google's words, in their IPO filing), but it mostly passes as a business hazard that is resolved to our satisfaction as end-users. There is an invisible line between optimising a website and spamming, but the point is, everybody does it. After all, nobody wants to end up at number 867 in a Google search. However, when a Google-bomb goes off, the pranksters manage to draw everybody's attention to the problem. Google got caught with its pants down recently, when searches for the word 'Jew' yielded results that privileged vicious anti-Semitic hate sites. The predictable uproar ensued, and Google had to issue an 'explanation': A site's ranking in Google's search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for 'Jew' brings up one such unexpected result. And: Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google. Some people concerned about this issue have created online petitions to encourage us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Because of our objective and automated ranking system, Google cannot be influenced by these petitions. The only sites we omit are those we are legally compelled to remove or those maliciously attempting to manipulate our results. (see http://www.google.com/explanation.html for full text). So Google admits that it 'omits' sites 'maliciously attempting to manipulate our results'. Google is currently being sued by SearchKing, a brazen spammer, who would get its clients to collude through 'linkfarms' that would dramatically improve their search placements. Google discovered this practice and seriously downgraded SearchKing. When SearchKing sued, Google restored its ranking, but the suit stayed because SearchKing contends that Google has overwhelmingly arbitrary powers in manipulating the rankings at any time. Nobody expects (or even wants) SearchKing to win, but the nagging question is what its Google ranking will be after the court's ruling. (Google now has its own legitimate linkfarm service, called AdSense). It is important to be clear about one thing: Google is well within its US First Amendment Rights to present its service as an 'evaluative opinion', no more, no less. Google, in fact, is constantly vigilant, inventing and implementing counter-measures to eliminate manipulators. But with each step it takes, it is drawing more and more unfavourable attention to itself. Issues are being brought up: like Google's arbitrariness, its inherent bias towards big players, its arch-conservatism and the company's seemingly blithe acceptance of its monopoly over Internet information dissemination. (A recent piece by the New York Times' Thomas L Friedman asked the question, 'Is Google God?' Friedman concluded with a resounding 'Yes'). And, to queer the pitch further, Google is going for an IPO very soon. The cute Bay area nerds are bidding to be big boys. This brings under intense scrutiny Google's revenue model, its highly secret methods and its future prospects. (Market analysts' estimates of Google's valuation range from $ 1 billion to $40 billion, to give you some idea of the confusion out there.) Google's edginess is also illustrated in the absurd case of the website that calls itself 'Booble'. Booble's home page exactly replicates the Google search page, except for the name, the 'I'm feeling cheap' button and its prominent claim to serve up 'the best adult entertainment' and its minuscule disclaimer saying it has nothing to do with Google. Plus, the two 'O's in 'Booble' are rendered as an ample pair of, well, boobs. Google is decidedly not amused. The lawyers' notices are flying back and forth (they are all on the net) and they essentially consist of Google seething and Booble chortling back. They began by disagreeing about whether or not Booble fit the legal description of a parody. Last checked, they were arguing about which one of them had a sense of humour! Inconsequential stuff, surely, but indicative of the jitters on the Internet playing field. Google's IPO application has seriously raised the stakes. For starters, Google plans to sell shares by auction, a move, some say, designed to blind naïve small investors who are dreaming of owning a piece of a miracle company. (Institutional investors would require a lot more disclosures and hard facts than Google seems prepared to offer.) More mysterious is founders Page and Brin's decision to sell some of their own stock as an article of faith. Most often, promoters offer to do the opposite - hold on to their shares for a statutory period to prove that they are not playing tricks with the market. Brin and Page are also emphatic that they will retain absolute control of Google through a dual-class stock system, citing the example of newspapers that cannot expose their editorial policy to the whims of the stock market. From their letter accompanying the IPO filing: "[...] we have set up a corporate [dual-class] structure that will make it harder for outside parties to take over or influence Google. [....] Google [] has a responsibility to the world. The dual-class structure helps ensure that this responsibility is met. [...] we will not unnecessarily disclose all of our strengths, strategies and intentions." Ultimately, Google is the pre-eminent search engine because we say it is. And we opt for Google because we believe its rankings are honest. To keep its rankings clean, Google has to be allowed to secretly modify its algorithms periodically, and keep out the cheats. The best analogy is that of an athletics championship. If some athletes get away with steroids, the others will have to follow suit to keep up. If nothing is done, athletes will train a lot less and visit drug companies more. In other words, websites will focus on spamming and worry less about web content. If that happens, it's game over. For everybody. There are some who are calling for government regulation of Google rather than self-governance. To be sure, there are companies like Teoma and Dogpile, and even Yahoo, who have caught up with Google's technology and are waiting for a loss of faith on our part. For now, the status quo holds. It would only be fair to end by pointing out that when I typed 'Google' in Google, search result numbers 10 and 11 were http://google.blogspace.com/ and www.googlewatch.org respectively. The first is Google's own blogger (web logger) site, which generously allows the naysayers to vent. Googlewatch contains the single largest concentration of anti-Google material on the Web. It certainly is not time to condemn Google(yet), but the wonder search engine's days of innocence are clearly over. (Sanjay Iyer is a Pune-based freelance writer and teacher.) InfoChange News & Features, July 2004
|
