Googlewashing: Can a search engine actually twist reality?

On the internet, as anywhere else, public opinion does matter a lot. So if your site/web article has a lot of following, chances are there would a lot of references to it on a number of websites. This in turn would give it a high Google ranking...

That is not bad, but can you really use this to give new meanings to already existing terms? Geoffrey Numberg seems to think so. This article in th New York Times goes on to discuss the pros ands cons of having an "uniquely democratic web"...
The article concludes by saying:

Seen from a Google's eye view, in fact, the Web is less like a piazza than a souk — a jumble of separate spaces, each with its own isolated chatter. The search engines cruise the alleyways to listen in on all of these conversations, locate the people who are talking about the subject we're interested in, and tell us which of them has earned the most nods from the other confabulators in the room. But just because someone is regarded as a savant in the barbershop doesn't mean he'll pass for wise with the people in the other stalls.

But one of the most important sites that Google uses for its Page Rank is DMOZ and because this is human controlled (supposedly by experts/followers of a particular field), there might be more truth to Google's search results than Numberg actually leads us to believe.

Posted by Navneet at May 19, 2003 07:25 AM | TrackBack | Comments disabled due to spam