More Is Not Necessarily Better

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bob Rosenberg <bob () bobrosenberg phoenix az us>
Date: August 23, 2004 11:07:43 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: NYTimes: More Is Not Necessarily Better

Dave

For IP.

Here's an interesting perspective on internet search engines.  It gives
one pause for thought.

Bob

***************

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
More Is Not Necessarily Better
By MATTHEW HINDMAN and KENNETH NEIL CUKIER
Google's influence on what users can see and do online reinforces a
worrisome trend on the Web.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/opinion/23hindman.html?th

--

Bob Rosenberg

"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular."
    --Adlai Stevenson

"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a
reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for
independence."
                              — C.A. Beard

*****************

More Is Not Necessarily Better
By MATTHEW HINDMAN and KENNETH NEIL CUKIER

Published: August 23, 2004

Imagine if one company controlled the card catalog of every library in
the world. The influence it would have over what people see, read and
discuss would be enormous. Now consider online search engines.

Few people realize that 95 percent of all Web searches in the United
States are handled by two companies, Google and Yahoo, either directly
or through other sites that use their technology. In the case of Google,
whose shares started to trade publicly last week, the company holds the
world's largest index of Web content, at more than four billion pages,
and handles more than 200 million searches a day. The influence of
search companies in determining what users worldwide can see and do
online is breathtaking.

As disquieting as this power may be, it masks a deeper problem. While
search engines are indispensable for finding information online, the
technology on which they are based serves to narrow the field of sites
that people see. In this respect, Google's technology reinforces a
worrisome feature of the Web: the trend toward consolidation that
affects everything from politics to news to commerce.

Google's use of links to find content essentially turns the Web into the
world's biggest popularity contest - and just as in high school, this
can have negative consequences. Google's great innovation in online
searching, and the main reason it is so successful, is that its
technology analyzes links among Web pages, not just the content within
them. Behind Google's complex ranking system is a simple idea: each link
to a page should be considered a vote, and the pages with the most votes
should be ranked first. This elegant approach uses the distributed
intelligence of Web users to determine which content is most relevant.

But what is good for Google is not necessarily good for the rest of the
Web. The company's technology is so strong that its competitors have
adopted a similar approach to organizing online information, which means
they now return similar search results. Thus popular sites become ever
more popular, while obscure sites recede ever further into the ether.

This winner-take-all system is not unique to the Web, but technology
seems to encourage it. That would explain the predominance of one or two
sites in almost every category of online information, be it eBay for
auctions or Amazon for books. When people are given lots of choices,
they tend to concentrate their attention on only a few. (Studies show,
for example, that the majority of users don't click past the first page
or two of results when looking for information online.)

Google's business model is based on tapping into the collective
intelligence of Internet users, so it was hardly surprising that it
would rely on the same approach when it went public. It used an auction
to determine its share price, bypassing Wall Street investment banks in
favor of prospective investors who were allowed to make their bids
online. An argument persists over whether this method was a financial
success - the day before it began trading, Google was forced to reduce
both the number of shares it offered and their price - but it was
undeniably a popular triumph: because of the auction, many more people
had the opportunity to buy shares at the initial offer price than if the
company had gone public the traditional way.

As Google begins its life as a public company, the question is not
merely how valuable it will be - it is how powerful it will be.
Investors will watch to see whether Google can preserve its dominant
position. For the public, however, of greater concern is how it uses its
influence over information and, more broadly, what happens when we place
so much control in the hands of companies like Google.

The $27 billion question - a figure based on the six-year-old company's
market valuation after its first day of trading - may be whether another
innovation comes along that challenges both Google's market dominance
and its methodology. Companies are already trying to "personalize"
searches, for example, taking into account who and where a user is. So a
search for "French press" will return results about journalism, dry
cleaners or coffee, depending on the user's interests.

None of this would be very important if the Web weren't so vital. Some
of the credit for the Web's vitality, of course, goes to Google itself.
And after last week, thousands of investors have a financial interest in
Google. Yet when we consider what the company means for the future of
the Web, we all have a stake.

Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Cukier are fellows at the National
Center for Digital Government at the Kennedy School at Harvard.


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