Sunil Masand

CS 312

Professor Wolf

"The most valuable commodity I know of is information...wouldn't you agree?"

Information is power. Generals of armies and leaders of nations know it. The feature film Wall Street's main character Gordon Gecko knew it when he said the above quote. And as we can clearly see on a regular basis in the news -- either on TV, online or in print -- Google most certainly knows it.

Geoffery Nunberg's artilce gives us much information on Google's influential role in our lives. And while, Google is for many, the de facto standard for search and information on the internet it is far from a perfect search engine. For this reason Nunberg's main qualm in the article is with Google's PageRank system which tries to match the best web pages for a given search query. He argues that this ranking system basically passes off the most popular web pages for a search term as the most truthful or accurate one. He makes a strong argument for this point and I feel did an excellent job at creating awareness to this issue with Google.

The article I chose by Stefanie Olson of News.com gives us much more information on Google's PageRank system. Ms. Olson reports in her article on how web hosting company Search King is suing Google on grounds that recent changes to its PageRank system -- which negatively affected Search King's listing on Google's system -- was intentionally meant to harm Search King's ranking and has thereby affected their business. PageRank, explains Ms. Olson, is the determination of where a page gets ranked for a particular search query, and is not made solely on the information given by the PageRank system. The other elements involved -- especially Google's algorithm that also plays a major part in the process -- have been kept notoriously secret.

My conclusion after reading both articles is that Google's -- or anybody else’s search engine's -- results will never be completely perfect. The user will ultimately have to keep a discerning eye on whether the top results given for a search term give accurate information on what they searched for or not. Google is a tool that should be used properly and -- since not perfect -- its results should always be checked for accuracy and reliability.

Citations

1. Olson, Stefanie. "Google sued over site rankings." CNet News.com. 2002. 11 March. 2006

<http://news.com.com/2100-1023-962913.html>.