Pure hyperbole and an alarmist rant.

The Guardian also does it.

I don't get it ? isn't it the same with every big company ? create a better search engine or a better model for internet advertisement and see how google falls .

"Google did not invent the index". Wow, I never guessed that.

I suppose advertising pollutes The Guardian as well does it? Adverts for holidays next to the latest social crisis. Simple answer: don't look at the bloody things.

Excellent article. When Wikipedia supplants Google (and it's not that far off), we will be free of their financial censorship at last.

If you think that Google is polluting the internet I guess you haven't heard of spam emails & pornsites.

I ignore all advertising
so do most people

Am I the only person who has never, ever clicked on an advert on the internet?

Anyway, the author is right to point out the inherent danger of allowing profit to drive the shaping of our access to information and knowledge, and in his statement that no method of organising knowledge is unbiased.

And Wikipedia's dominance (and malleability) also bears examination.

However, serious consideration should be given to the benefits and drawbacks of the alternatives. Allowing librarians and scholars to "organise" knowledge into subjects also carries with it the risk of bias (academics are not notoriously unbiased in their presentation of theories and evidence) AND ossification, in that led by the nose we can simply deepen the ruts of specialisation and miss links that can be explored fruitfully.

In the end it's up to every human being to take responsibility for their own MIND and the use to which they put it. Perhaps it would be more potent to point your critical gaze at the BBC and Eastenders, or our pub culture, or capitalism as purveyor of modern opiates and distractions from learning, sense and genuinely lived - as opposed to vicarious - experiences?

Grazing the web (via Google and Wikipedia) I make connections between the Stoics, Buddhism, Jung, Emergence, and many more streams of ancient and modern consciousness that all one way or another describe something I find strange, thrilling and important.

I could categorise it, but in doing so would colour it with associations and a heritage that belong to other cultures and times and not truly to "the thing in itself", as Kant would call it. Categories obscure as much as enlighten, mislead as well as lead.....

In the end life is a personal responsibility. Eastenders or Russell.....Google or The British Library.....I could never have got this from a library; not in a million years.....so we should celebrate, as well as refine....

This article is similar in a way to the threads on cif about Universities having souls....I think they do, but their soul is an emergent property of the complex web of relationships between people and knowledge, and it is migrating....as souls do....onto the internet....People navigate, not all unaided.....when the pupil is ready the teacher will appear.....not necessarily at a time and institution appointed (and anointed) by the Government or academic convenience....the times they truly are a changing....

Isn't life a miracle, and absolute joy....what will you learn today?

If adevrtising keeps interesting sites going ...thats fine by me!!!!!!!
I just ignore and forget in about 2 nanoseconds

Mikeeverset

brilliant ....the hegemony on knowledege is over

Errr...fair point - but if you object so much, start using another search engine and also don't click on any adverts on the internet...and if enough people do that, Google's model will fail.

It will either way - when the next black swan appears

What an almighty load of drivel this is.

White assumes we're all passive vessels that obediently consume without any form of critical capacities whatsoever.

Alarmist nonsense.

It's surprising that there hasn't been any serious attempt (AFAIK) to set up an open-source search engine.

I suppose the problem is that search engines need vast amounts of storage, processing and connection bandwidth. They don't come cheap. But a benevolent billionaire might be able to fund the project as a hobby or tax loss, as Mark Shuttleworth has done for Ubuntu Linux and Jimmy Wales has done for Wikipedia.

Oh for goodness sake. Even if the internet is the "library of human knowledge" --which I doubt--then it's unlikely that seekers after the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas will be siphoned of to buy holidays from Thomas Cook on the basis that people "can't tell ads from content".

If the author wants to make his case he should at least have included some examples of how google has actually distorted a search rather than merely peppered it with adverts. There are other search engines, as well as ad blockers, or you can just use /

Well if that's how you feel, you are free to start an organisation in competition with Google which presents your version of the human conditional.

This is just another version of the tired and boring politics of envy.

I think wikipedia is probably the answer to this article, when generations yet unborn look back at our time, they can look at our interweb and think to themselves, wow that's quite neat.

eh..

The vast library that is the internet is flooded with so many advertisements that many people claim not to notice them anymore.

..i dont notice 'em any more, i second your observation sir. the guardian and irish times sites (my two main news sources) are 'polluted' with ads but as long as it keeps their content free i can deal with it. wikipedia has no ads, there's a 'public search engine of knowledge' to content yourself with mr white..

Micah White
So what is your idea for a non-commercial paradigm for organizing the internet ?

I have scoured through your essay but you didn't propose anything substantial with respect to an alternative. Probably the Google guys have also spent 10 years wondering how to make money out of their system, and finally settled down on advertising because they could find none else ?

also, the 'library of human knowledge' is mostly comprised of vacuous blogs and porn..

Now it is up to us to realise the dream of a non-commercial paradigm for organising the internet.

Awe, do we gotta? Why don't we all just install FlashBlock and get on with our lives.

maybe he works for television industry or print industry you know. Internet ads are bad, but TV, Print ads are good is his message. I wonder what he has to say about facebook ads.

If you don't like adverts on websites there's always Adblock Plus. (Personally, I don't mind, as long as they aren't animated.)

Regarding Google:

1. there are no barriers to entry -- anyone can write their own software to crawl the web and allow people to search their index

2. Google wasn't the first search engine. It got where it is today by being a lot less advert-intensive and short-term "commercial" than its rivals, who put a little search box in the middle of the screen surrended by ads and other crud.

3. sponsored links in Google searches are clearly marked as such, and easy to remove (with Adblock Plus).

4. if you don't like Google, there are plenty of other search engines.

In short, this article is overblown nonsense.

You haven't seen anything yet!

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I ignore all advertising so do most people

If you think you're ignoring it it's probably doing its job very well.

An advertising agency has monopolised, disorganised, and commercialised the largest library in human history. Without a fundamental rethinking of the way knowledge is organised in the digital era, Google's information coup d'état will have profound existential consequences.

My gosh! What a pile of nonsense, first the Internet itself is not a 'library', second knowledge 'organization'? get a manual of HTML and we can start talking about it and third Google is simply an 'index', not the 'internet index' as such.

What Google did differently 10 years ago was fixing an old problem: Old search engines used to alter the search results orders, favouring commercial sponsored 'links' first rather than by relevance. Google simply kept the 'relevance' untouched, they used 'sponsored' links in the side of the screen. No more to add to it.

Any web master can 'massage' their 'search terms' as they wanted, search engines will always depends on information sources that cannot be verified, therefore the problem.

Whilst other technologies such as 'Semantic Web' (RDF) will allow to generate 'multiple dimensions' for search/publish information, still is a long way to go.

But more importantly, if you don't like Google...use Bing, Yahoo, etc,etc. Simple...

Vacuous crap for the hand-wringers/conspiracy theorists.

Ads line the top and right of the search results page, are displayed next to emails in Gmail, on our favourite blog, and beside reportage of anti-corporate struggles.

Er, no, not on my computer. I simply block the ads.

Have you not seen the adverts on this page?

I have been working in internet advertising for over a decade so excuse my opinion that I know what I'm talking about here.

Firstly, a lot of sites, especially the smaller non-Commercial ones rely on a small but steady stream of advertising revenue in order to pay for their hosting.

Without these sites, which offer minority interests and minority points of view the web would be nothing but an online shopping arcade. So they use an adserver or have an Adsense banner ? Big deal.

The implication that somehow Google could manipulate their SERPS in order to promote some sources of knowledge ahead of others is far more serious, but Google already has sponsored (i.e. paid for) listings and they display them clearly.

The generic set of search returns rely on a complex algorithm which Google keeps secret because if they made it public an 'alternative Google' could be set up overnight stealing their IP rights.

Webmasters know this algorithm relies on PageRank (which itself is derived from incoming links), context, content, page title, URL, TLD, incoming link anchor text, description and metadata, though what weighting is given to each element is unknown, though when changes are made they can be picked up instantly.

The next generation of search engines will used semantic search and Google will have to change if it wishes to keep its dominant position in search.

Example of this, with Google Instant on started typing A P P L E S (without the gaps) and see how long it takes before it stops listing Steve Jobs company. Semantic search will fix this.

If you think ads on the internet are a pain, you should try watching a movie on ITV4.

Advertising on the internet is useless, because the ads are read just as superficially as anything else.

I agree that skimming the internet is concerning, and does indeed lead to a lack of depth and interest. The problem, is the virtual infiniteness of it. An improvising musician, for example; before they play a note, has an infinite number of possibilities to choose from. The sheer difficulty of plucking something out of this, means that most often, what is played is a safe, underwhelming permutation of something the performer has done before. Or a disjointed fleeting grab of half developed ideas. To overcome this, normally a performer will impose limits beforehand. And the same should go for browsing the internet effectively. So in conclusion; if you're enjoying viewing "Big Bootys vol7," ignore the impulse to click vol8 to see if it's any better. It's not. And it's even worse of you skim through vol 1-12 viewing thirty seconds of each, although tempting, it makes the whole experience something of a waste of time

MoneoSionaLeto

30 October 2010 12:17PM

I ignore all advertising
so do most people

Indeed they do. The standard expected click rate is 1%, and the standard expected completion rate is also 1%, meaning for 1 click you need 100 views of the ad, and to make 1 sale you need 100 clicks, so by putting an ad on your page you need to generate 10,000 views to expect 1 sale.

There are a lot of people making small amounts of money with this, enough to cover their costs. Very small are making serious sums.

sorry, Very few, not very small.

The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore.

Google doesn't control the index of human knowledge - it control an index of human knowledge.

There are dozens of search engines - if you don't like Google, use another.

/home/2010/10/in-resurrecting-the-intercept-modernisation-programme-the-government-breaks-a-clear-basic-and-fundam.html

Twelve years ago, in the first public documentation of their technology, the inventors of Google warned that advertising corrupts search engines. "[W]e expect that advertising-funded search engines," Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote, "will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." And they condemned as particularly "insidious" the sale of the top spot on search results; a practice Google now champions.

No, there's an enormous difference between the practice they condemned and the practice they now champion. In the practice they condemned, the advertising was disguised as the top result.

Though Google now puts ads in a fairly prominent position, it doesn't put them in place of the content. And it clearly marks them as sponsored links, so they don't pollute the search results at all.

Google is still the best search engine, still good at displaying search results, and still keeps results and advertising separate. Your attacks on it are entirely unjustified.

Somebody has to pay for it.

The choice is not between a Google with advertising and a Google without advertising, it is between Google as it is or nothing at all.

Unless of course you wish to fund the internet and search engines by subscription. Hands up all those prepared to pay for what we get free now.

Thought not.

Great article.

Many of these comments are pathetically unsound because they either miss the issue or address it. Examples: "I don't read/respond to advertising", "the guardian does this", "use another engine" etc.

There is one ready solution: ad blocking browser ad-ons. though that only works so long as it doesn't catch on, so it will no doubt continue to be great for me :-).

I use ad blocker and it transforms the web for me. Ironically though, I allow ads in Google because of my professional interest in web search, marketing and SEO. And yes I have clicked on those ads. I've also placed ads there too, though not currently as organic search is working well.

Contradictions? Of course, respect them!

PS WTF! Why the hell is Google Chrome highlighting "Google" as a spelling error as I edit this!?

Let the Local Authorities run search engines. That will fix everything.

The adverts don't bother me, although I don't like the animations I can't be bothered with the add-on business, I just use internet explorer for flash stuff and mozilla for my main browser, wave of the future huh?

This is an excellent article. It will never said enough how much the Googlopoly is threatening not only for our cultures but simply for our identites.
Google has made himself 'indispensable' such a role should be left in the hands of a private entity acting for 'free' at the benefice of users' privacy. More on Googolopoly and the need to take concious: /

and a growing (sic) of teachers and public intellectuals are coming to the realisation that search engines encourage skimming,

..teachers and public intellectuals (?)..I think I'll stick with Google thanks.

I'm really not sure why the Guardian features this chap as all his articles are slightly bonkers.

As evidenced by the tragic reality that most people can't tell the difference between ads and content any more, this commercial barrage is having a cultural impact.

"Tragic"? Do me a favour.
Given that millions of people use Google as a commercial directory - ie to search for holidays, restaurants, property, products etc - so what?
And who are all these people that are so bleedin' thick they can't tell the difference between an ad and content? Where is your evidence?
And why the assumption that all non-ad "content" is so wonderful? It is just as possible for it to be as skewed, distorted, innacurate and biased as something that is designed to sell.

Don't use it then.

My, what a load of cobblers.

Google got where it is today by organising information better than anyone else. The main thing it sells are relevant search results. If advertising encroaches to the degree that it affects relevance and integrity of the search results, people will simply go elsewhere.

And it doesn't help that the author has to resort to lying:

And they condemned as particularly "insidious" the sale of the top spot on search results; a practice Google now champions.

AdWords are not search results. They appear next to search results, but they don't interfere with the results themselves in any way. I find it ironic that all it took was a split-second Google search to research this.

It's no surprise, though, that the author would be opposed to the split-second verification of information, given that he's disposed to saying things like:

Without a fundamental rethinking of the way knowledge is organised in the digital era, Google's information coup d'état will have profound existential consequences.

Thanks to Google, the superficiality of index learning is infecting our culture, our society, and our civilisation.

The omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the horizon of our thought.

To which all I can say is 'citation needed'. I mean, it's nice for the author and all that someone pays him to talk like this, but I doubt anyone other than he and his PhD supervisor find it socially useful.

Google doesn't just organise web pages, but geographical information, art, news, stock quotes, patents, books - all that information for free to anyone who wants it (and wouldn't be able to access it otherwise, especially if they live in a developing country).

How much time has Google personally saved each of us? Trillions of man hours easily. It would be very nice to sit in an oak-panelled office browsing 'categories' of information at your leisure, but the vast majority of people simply don't work like that.

What about the thousands of small websites and blogs (some of them important political voices) that depend on AdWords for survival?

If you think a non-profit can deliver anything remotely like this, you're insane. Google is possibly one of the biggest forces for good of the information age, and we should thank our lucky stars that this responsibility has fallen into the hands of a company which, by and large, seems to have human interests at heart.

The answer to any perceived problem is media literacy, learning which information to trust and which has vested interests. This problem isn't unique to the internet, and would still exist no matter who organised the world's information. This article is awful.

Now it is up to us to realise the dream of a non-commercial paradigm for organising the internet. Only then will humanity find the wisdom it needs to deal with the many crises that threaten our shared future.

I don't think that's worked out too well for China since Google has been heavily censored there.

I have always had a deep dislike for having advertising constantly squirted at me, and in the olden days, would not watch commercial TV or listen to commercial radio, because I could not stand the ads.

Now, in the day of the internet, I find I can almost totally avoid advertising. Adblock means web pages are cleaned. Now, I read content which formally I would have obtained from newspapers or magazines, and which would have been surrounded in advertising, is now clean. Video which was previously saturated is now available via file sharing, completely stripped of ads.

If you do not like ads, do not expose yourself to them. For me, the internet age means I hardly ever have to see or listen to the damn stuff. Just great!

Get Firefox, Adblock Plus and NoScript and learn how to use them.

Kills 99% of browser pollution, even around the rim.

(No cute furry animals were harmed during the making of this anti-commercial)

Whereas subject classification creates harmony and encourages serendipity; indexes fracture knowledge into snippets making us stupid.

I wouldn't be so sure of that: subject classification is just as much about fracturing knowledge, albeit on a more structured basis. "A place for everything, and everything in its place" - one of classification's goals - doesn't in itself favour harmony or serendipity compared to Google's jumble of search results, and can prodice similarly arbitrary results. Electonic media's ability to put a single item in as many locations as we like (unlike a copy of a book) of course means that in theory we should be able to devise the perfect arrangement of knowledge ("the right places for everything, and evrything in all the places appropriate to it"), but I haven't been much encouraged by the results I've seen.

Wikipedia's actually very interesting in its demonstration of our conceptual backwardness in relation to what the technology can deliver. The site's provision of unlimited hyperlinking offers opportunities for economy, hierarchy and depth unavailable to past compilers of knowledge, but instead we get gargantuan entries burdened with redundant detail that could be more usefully spun off into more specific items. That's because we prefer linearity to complexity, with the result that even when we approach something as potentially rich and multi-layered as online classification we tend to approach it just like identifying the right gap to stick a book in on a shelf, which it isn't.

I have to confess I had to search something bland just to remind myself what Google's "sponsored links" are: if asked I too would have had a hard time identifying them, so I'd probably count as one of the dummies even though I know they're not what I was looking for and accordingly don'r click on them: like many others I just don't "see" them, so I probably wouldn't remember what they are. For some people on the other hand they may well be just what they were looking for. There's no shortage of dumb on the internet, but users may be not quite that dumb - even those with rather pedestrian wants.

For the ones who are asking why does it matters, and think anyway they never look at the adds, or think, just don't use Google if not happy,....
For serving you free indexed search results accompanied with a zest of adverts, Google keeps records on users, Google sniffles private house wifi/emails/passwords information, Google stores information from our web browsing and every single activities he can intercept.
The right to privacy is a fundamental human rights.
Collecting and storing data is a security risk.
The right to search internet as a source of knowledge is fundamental.

For all these reasons and more, I do agree with the author, we do need a public, impartial, controlled and respected search engine, acting as a public service and not advertising driven search results.
See for more: /

So how is a search engine that does not do ads supposed to generate the billions required to keep it going? Ah... "The Government"

How can anyone hanker after categorised or schematic knowledge in the 21C let alone suggest that it is somehow disinterested and pure. On the contrary, categorisation in knowledge has always been a manifestation of power employed by whoever is powerful. No surprise that there is a lot of it in the Bible then!

Google is also not an index in any historical sense of the word. It is a mechanism for looking through stuff and semantic searching is just around the corner.

Finally, knowledge has been reconceptualised through the internet as a whole and not through Google and the writer needs to cope with that.

Pretty sloppy stuff really, editor. A bit more rigour would help!