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A L S O__T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K What sucks about cyberspace? Counter the abundance of Internet hype with some whining and complaining in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk ___________________
R E C E N T L Y Microsoft on Microsoft Pod people Boon or boondoggle? Let's Get This Straight Internet censure-ship - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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YES, THERE IS A BETTER SEARCH ENGINE | PAGE 1, 2
Google.com started as a research project by a couple of Stanford grad students -- which, of course, is just how Yahoo, the directory site that has become the Web's most popular service, began. Yahoo tends to be more valuable than other search sites because its index is created by human beings rather than computer programs. But for the same reason, Yahoo has a hard time keeping up with the Web's explosive growth. Google gets remarkably smart search results by using a mathematical algorithm that rates your site based on who links to you. The ranking depends not simply on the number of sites that link to you, but on the linking sites' own importance rating. The result is a kind of automated peer review that sifts sites based on the collective wisdom of the Web itself. The program is complex, but the proof is in the results. Since discovering Google a few weeks ago, I've been so impressed with its usefulness and accuracy that I've made it my first search stop. Google isn't a finished product yet. Its creators, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, started their company only three months ago, and the Google.com home page calls itself an "alpha test." Page says the current version of Google, which has indexed about 60 million pages, will continue to be improved as the company expands. He adds that the search tool, which is running on Linux systems, ought to "scale up" well as the Web keeps growing. And according to Page, its site-ranking approach is nearly impossible for devious webmasters to trick or "spam," since it's based on links and judgments made by other respected sites: "You have to actually convince someone who's important that you're important." In my book, Google itself is important -- as a sign, amid the profusion of look-alike portals, that there's still plenty of room for improvement in the basic technologies we use on the Web every day. If the portals themselves don't generate innovation, smart people elsewhere will. Commerce is a big driving force in how the Web evolves, but creativity is another. Just as imaginative marketers will keep finding ways to sell us more stuff, inventive programmers will keep finding ways to reduce noise and confusion online and help us all find what we're looking for. The irony here is that the big portal sites are the ones, increasingly, making it harder to use the Web: They're under such pressure to turn a profit to justify their market valuations that their pages have become crowded, blinking arrays of commercial distractions. Meanwhile, they're failing to drive forward the technology at the root of their business. That a couple of grad students could build a better search engine than a whole raft of media and technology companies with stock-market valuations in the billions does not speak well of how these firms are spending their budgets. Which is one more reason to distrust the conventional view that the
portals have the future of the Web sewn up. There's something ultimately
dumb about these all-things-to-all-people sites in a medium whose greatest
strength is the ability to be specific things to specific people. If the
portals can't even build a better search engine, I am not betting on their
ability to control an industry as fast-moving, innovative and metamorphic
as the Internet -- next year or any year.
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