[-]“Google is really built around aha moments,” Schmidt said at the National Governors Association meeting in 2007. He was talking about those dazzling scenarios when you give Google almost nothing to work with, such as entering “pizza” into its query box, and the online search engine sifts through one trillion pages to deliver the number of your local store. It’s those aha moments, he said, that have created a remarkable and unprecedented trust in the company. These days, Google probably knows more about its users than any company in history. Receiving 100 billion queries each month, it’s now worth $US395 billion. But a few weeks ago, the European Court of Justice showed some disenchantment with the search engine. They announced that European users now have a right to demand that Google remove links from its results page that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”. Commentators largely bashed the judgement – calling it a blight on freedom of speech and a move that could allow people to rewrite history. These arguments show that while the European court is no longer hypnotised by Google, many still are. But this is not the first time Google’s power over information has been questioned. In 2011, concerns emerged that the search giant was inadvertently distorting information. The fear, sparked by US internet activist Eli Pariser, was that in the company’s mission to “give you exactly the information you want, right when you want it”, Google was ignoring a more difficult goal: to give you the unbiased information that you need. Pariser argued that through its search algorithms, which are largely kept secret, Google was creating so called “filter bubbles” – spheres where users would only be fed information that they liked, rather than accurate results.[-] thesaturdaypaper.au/2014/06/07/googles-searches-narrowing-our-experience/1402063200#.U7zGLCFArVJ
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 04:49:05 +0000