Alternative Insight
Rating Google
Is the Internet losing its promise of being an honest and reliable media for learning current events and conducting research? The Internet provides a multi-dimensional voice to the constrained appearance of a conventional media. As world populations become more familiar with computer surfing, the Internet media continues to evolve and replace print media. The abundance of disparate views, access to authentic research and archives, and counter arguments to accepted views have increased thought and knowledge and augmented powers of decision. This phenomenon is developing well with those interested in worldwide affairs; go to BBC, Guardian or Zaman for news or Anti-war.com for analysis, or, hey, how about Alternative Insight? Commentators who speak honestly and authoratively are finding outlets and being discovered. The world is getting wiser.The multitude of present day Internet pages succeed in bringing a world view to the world's population, in releasing masses from captivity to local and often biased media. However, in observing the past for ordering the future, the Internet starts to fail. The most prominent danger is the growing Google monopoly as a one-stop information center; a library of archived material and daily news references. The Google search engine presents retrieved information ordered more by clever search engine optimization (SEO) and less on content. Information is not rigorously validated and mis-information arrives more quickly.
The factor that most influences the Google search engine is matching the search words with the title tag of an article.
Use as a search expression: reparations for african americans, and the leading pages of 400,000 retrieved articles will have the expression in its title. Use reparations for afro-americans in the search and the leading pages of 5600 retrieved articles is exactly titled Reparations for Afro-Americans. Is the latter article mistitled? Apparently so, because most researchers use the former expression and therefore have little opportunity to retrieve the latter article. Those searching with the reparations for african americans words will not obtain the articles that use the Reparations for Afro-Americans words, although the latter might have superior content.Another significant factor Google uses to equate pages to search terms is the Global Link Popularity of Site. If reputable sites, which have a relation to an article's subject, link to a page, then that page receives a higher Google ranking. That makes sense, and is about the only means Google has to determine, although indirectly, the worth and professionalism of the article's content. Well,not entirely; academics with web sites favor their own views and link to sites that popularize their views. Many professions have vested interests in accepted knowledge and are quick to ignore and not popularize information that refutes invested lines of thought. Consider the subjects of natural selection and inheritance of acquired traits .
Enter natural selection as search words and an abundance of articles describing natural selection emerge. No rebuttal to natural selection appears in the first twenty search results.
Enter inheritance of acquired traits as a search word and many of the first ten results either rebut Lamarck's theory or are trivial expositions of the topic.Natural selection is a well accepted theory, but has some critics. Inheritance of acquired traits is not a well accepted theory and has many critics. Nevertheless,it is obvious that Global Link Popularity, which contains those well associated with natural selection, has biased the search mechanism to select articles that favor natural selection and articles that don't favor inheritance of acquired traits. Content plays a secondary role.
Take another topic; the 1989 controversial Tiananmen Square confrontation. Since incident, rather than massacre, has become the accepted description, use the words Tiananmen Square incident as the search expression. Find out that most of the retrieved articles still use the descriptive word massacre rather than incident. Not until the twentieth article do we learn that the conventional media reports on the Tiananmen incident are questioned and might not be correct.
Google's steady rise to establishing itself as a one stop shopping center for all reports compounds the situation. Take Google's presentation of news reports of riots in Tibet. Here we go again. Use Tibet riots as the search words. Learn that most of Google's highly ranked reports are not based on first hand knowledge, but on rumors, exaggerations and biased reports form Tibetan exile groups. The search results even portrays riots in Nepal as riots in Tibet. Is that honest reporting of current events?
What does all this mean? It means that the Internet is in danger of losing its promise as an honest and reliable media for learning current events and conducting research. What to do? New search engines that contain mechanisms for rating articles principally on professionalism, accuracy, reliability, uniqueness and depth of content must be developed - a big job, no question, but it can and must be done.
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may 1, 2008HOME PAGE MAIN PAGE 
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