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February 10, 2006
All Eyes on Google (Newsweek)
Let's face it—it's good to be Google. Every minute, worldwide, in 90 languages, the index of this Internet-based search engine created by these Stanford doctoral dropouts is probed more than 138,000 times. In the course of a day, that's over 200 million searches of 6 billion Web pages, images and discussion-group postings. Searches for golf clubs, song lyrics, tomorrow night's blind date, recipes and the unaltered screen shots of Janet Jackson's Super Bowl boo-boo. Amazingly, the majority of those queries evoke satisfactory, even revelatory, results. Google has changed the way the world finds things out, and enticed it to look for things previously considered unfindable.
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Of course, Google's biggest problem may well be (cue soundtrack from "Jaws") Microsoft. Bill Gates is constitutionally unable to countenance the idea that a cheeky Silicon Valley start-up can claim even the mildest role as an Internet gateway. Last autumn Gates told NEWSWEEK that his company's complacency in search was a grave error that would soon be corrected. "We didn't make it as much of a priority as we should have," he said. "We recognized that, and we're on the job." At the World Economic Forum earlier this year, he was even more frank: "[Google] kicked our butts," he said. The last time Microsoft felt similarly embarrassed—when it failed to notice that the Internet was kind of going to be a big thing—Gates started a companywide jihad that didn't stop until his competitor, Netscape, was eviscerated.
[Last night, a colleague brought up Google during a reading group discussion about current composition pedagogy, or what is being taught and not taught, along with for whom. Many people believe that Google returns results based upon how many times a certain search is initiated, but that is not how results are determined, which I learned after reading Dr. Dennis G. Jerz's online seminar presentation about Assessing Google as a Teaching & Research Tool. Instead, Google's rankings are based upon how many other sites are linking to the web page containing your search terms. Therefore, a user cannot "stuff the ballot box" by repeating a search term umpteen times. It was a great discussion! BK]
Posted by kuechebj at February 10, 2006 04:20 PM