Goggling at Google

So what spurred my rant on the French revolution? Lara Marlowe wrote a piece in the Irish Times about a French project to digitise old newspapers in which she quoted the director of the Bibliotheque Nationale de Franc, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, suggesting that Europe do something about the hegemony of American information sources on the internet. I have for some time been worried about the near monopoly google has on student's research. Even when far more appropriate tools are available to strong students the pull of just typing in a question to google is irresistable. The example cited by M.Jeanneney was the prevailing attitudes to the French revolution in the Anglo-saxon world - that now includes us by the way - which would be quite shocking and extreme to most French people. The funny thing is that a search for 'french revolution' on google brings you to George Mason University's excellent site.

Are the French being paranoid? I don't think so. It would be them that points it out of course, but in the face of a sustained barrage of public and official racism that is truly shocking and awesome (shock and awe together are a euphemism for terror) I think they probably have more cause to worry than most not in actual imminent danger of having a president googling for a target which he will then order bombed back to the stone age. If he choses a target that isn't already living in the stone age of course.

Google has reached a monopoly just as it has become less reliable. Networks of links, farmed and managed by commercial organisations, are undermining the relevancy and purity of its beautiful ranking system. No doubt they are programming day and night to fix it. No doubt also that once you start hacking and kludging your very paradigm has been undermined. In reality of course their system was compromised from the beginning by non-automated systems ranking the importance of linking sites (you don't really think they weighted every site on the internet do you?) but we ignored that as it solved the problem of reams of useless sites making their way through the older stochastic relevence ranking systems. Those systems were undermined immediately by web programmers spamming their sites up the robots ranking. A war of attrition began with the search engines which the 'bot programmers, playing catch up with the field, was destined to lose. What google did to get around this was rank sites by how many sites linked to them and weight these sites by how many linked to them. In practise, in the early days, this meant being on the top of Yahoo! I know this from looking after a website that was on the top of google's ranking for years despite having much larger competitors that had many more sites linking to them.

You all remember, I'm sure, that typing in 'French military victories' into google and hitting 'I feel lucky' leads you to a page asking do you mean 'French military defeats' and such racist nonsense as -
'World War I
Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States. Thousands of French women find out what it's like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn't call her "Fraulein." Sadly, widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.'
To set the record straight, just as Germany was defeated in WWII by the Soviet Union, the Western front was an irrelvance, Germany was defeated as an attacking force in WWI by France and the appalling losses it was willing to take to defend itself from invasion. Those losses effectively finished it as a warring nation for the foreseeable future. Given its history of invading most of Europe for the previous centuries this was probably not a bad thing.
So yes, the French are right to be worried by an unreliable racist monopoly on information.