Google, The Book Settlement, And “Gaming” Search Results
I’ve mentioned before that my online acquaintance Wolfinthewood (Gillian Spraggs, for those of you just joining us) has turned her considerable academic talents to the Google Book Settlement. She has a paper explaining aspects of the settlement you can download in PDF. While I am not sure I agree with her contention that the settlement may not be such a hot idea (again, I will NOT argue about it here) there’s something about this that is causing me a great deal of concern.
Wolf mentioned last week (on Friday, to be precise) that the search rankings for her post announcing the paper got, well eaten somehow. Now it seems her post(s) about the settlement have been somehow removed from being even indexed by Google. So has the page on her personal website containing the text of her paper.
Not just down below a mass of other pages in rankings. No. We are talking about completely gone. Un-indexed.
As Wolf says:
As I recall it, two things brought Google to its present commanding position. First, a superior search engine. And secondly, the fact that we trusted their results. Google did not go down the road that some search engines did, of mixing paid-for advertising links invisibly with the rest. And in those days their search results were always supposed to be strictly objective, generated through their famous algorithm. Absolutely no hand-fiddling.
Earlier this year anxieties were being widely expressed that Google might censor the books in the Book Service. There is a provision in the Google Book Search agreement that allows Google to exclude up to 15% of the digitised works from its database, without giving a reason. The agitation died away after Google’s representatives put their hands on their hearts and said the company had no intention of practising censorship. So that was all right, then.
This is exactly the same point I (and others) made about Amazon “gaming” search rankings–how on earth could we trust rankings or searches, once we know they have been fiddled with even once? It’s an arrow large online companies have in their quiver, one we now know they will use–if they think they can get away with it.
If they think nobody’s looking or likely to protest.
I am not entirely 100% sure Wolf’s post and paper has been the victim of such gaming. But it looks awful funny, doesn’t it? I mean, with pages completely disappearing from indexing? Just the pages concerning a Certain Subject, and not the other pages on the website? I am now curious and suspicious, and wondering what other voices in the debate about the Google Book Settlement have not been heard.
This does not bode well.
Related posts:
- Another View On The Google Book Settlement
- More On The Google Book Settlement
- William Morris Google Memo “Off Target”
Tags: questions from the edge, the internets they know everything
August 16th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Thanks for this post, Lilith. This will interest you, I am sure: this new post of yours, with the links to my posts, has conjured my posts of 12th and 14th back into the blog search index.
I am pretty sure it is this post of yours that has brought them back: there is a link next to them in the index, with the link text ‘Reference’, which links to a search result with this page of yours on it.
My post of 12th August with the original link to my paper is currently on page two of the search results for the term ‘google book settlement’.
It will be interesting to see how long my posts survive in the index this time. I am still quite suspicious about the way they disappeared, when earlier posts of mine were still in the index.
August 16th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Control the forum and you have the ability to control the content; therefore granting you the ability to control, or at least greatly influence, the thought process of those within the forum.
In the late 1930′s and early-to-mid 1940′s, I daresay few, if any, BBC radio broadcasts were being played over Nazi Germany’s state-controlled radio networks. The same concept can be applied to the NATO radio propaganda network which attempted to entice soviet defectors during the Cold War.
Google isn’t foolish. It is in business to make money; and no multi-billion dollar corporation likes to see its good name marred by anything less than courtroom dominance, the price of the stock may drift downward a penny or two, and that just won’t do. So Google went on the offensive, and is likely in the process of removing any mention of any settlement from its search parameters.
Corporate censorship isn’t new. Matt Groeing once took a comedic jab at his boss, Rupert Murdoch (grand-high-poo-bah of the evil NewsCorp/FOX right-wing media empire). In an episode of “The Simpsons”, during a segment of Springfield Tonight, the scroll at the bottom of the screen read “Rupert Murdoch confirms homosexual tendencies”, or some such nonsense. A playful jab at the boss, which led to the firing of the management people who approved the joke, and a severe reprimand to Groeing. Seth McFarlane took a few swings at FOX as a network during Family Guy’s second season, and was rewarded with a cancellation notice.
In the end, the more reliant people are on the internet as a source of information, the more power those who control the information have.