I've also heard similar things about wikipedia, how google was fond of their idea and promoted them and pushed them to the top of many of their searches before anyone had even begun to start hearing of wikipedia. Again there are times when wikipedia is not at the top, but something definitely occurred and has been spoke of on both ends as to the "sweetheart" relationship between google and wikipedia. Here's a link to another blurb by Nicholas Carr on the topic: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.php
Also recently doing a name search for me brings up some results that I think must have paid to come to the top of name searching: classmates.com (upon seeing this I deleted every piece of me from their site) and linkedIn, which I have a profile on, but I don't understand why it is the top hit for my name... something about these seem fishy to me.
Thinking about the things that are given priority towards the top it makes me wonder what we are missing on the web, what doesn't fall into the web that google collects...
I'll end this post with the podcast list that I subscribe to and listen to very regularly (I have quite the commute):
ALSC Blog Podcast
Comedy Central Stand Up (Video)
Delicious TV Veg
KEXP Song of the Day
KEXP Video of the Week
MoMa, The Museum of Modern Art New York
The Moth Podcast
MPR: The Current Song of the Day
The New Yorker Animated Cartoons
NPR: All Songs Considered Podcast
NPR: Car Talk
NPR: Driveway Moments
NPR: Live Concerts from All Songs Considered
NPR: Second Stage Podcast
NPR: Story of the Day
NPR: StoryCorps
NPR: Wait Wait Don't Tell Me
Onion News Network
The Sarah Silverman Program
Sesame Street Podcast
Stand Up Comedy
TEDTalks (Video)
This American Life
That's a much longer list than I anticipated when starting this, but I highly recommend almost all of those.
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When you say you deleted everything from classmates.com, make sure they deleted you from their servers. You may be surprised to discover that even though your information isn't available on the web via a search, it's still available on their servers, and should you choose to reactivate your account, all your information will just pop into place.
ReplyDeleteThings just don't disappear once they're placed on the Internet.
One of the reasons I use ask.com as my primary search engine is because google started to annoy me with the aggressive wikipedia promoting since I'm sure there are more relevant items that could have come up. It's always interesting, to me, to compare search engine results and see how different one rank pages--I guess it's a result of the different algorithms they use . . .
ReplyDeleteIs there any way to find out about which results Google pushes to the top? Or is that the big secret of their search algorithm?
ReplyDeleteI found a search site called Google Minus Google (http://www.startupbin.com/google-google/) that gives you the search results, but takes out all Google-related results (from YouTube, Blogger, etc.), but you still get Wikipedia, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If these sweetheart deals were made public, I guess it would be pretty simple for someone with some know-how to make a Google Minus Payola search tool, and that would be bad for Google, right? Wait, is payola evil?
wow i should really get on the bandwagon and check some of these podcasts out. thanks for the list!
ReplyDelete