Pretty bland article on the a political uses of google bombing. What a fun subject, too bad the Old Grey Lady's moisture less vagina sucked all the life from it.
The concept of google bombing has been hashed over enough, and don't look here for another analysis of that per se (though it is nice, when one is in a sad mood to run a google for Sen. Rick Santorum and see dan savage's definition of the sanctimonious bastard pop up on the first page).
The article did raise some questions about "popularity" in search engines, esp. google and the relation of that popularity to the trust of other users judgment. The way I understand it (which is sure to be half correct and involve gross overgeneralizations) the engines go by how many websites link to a particular search term, and of those how popular those refering websites are. Fair enough.
My question is this; is popularity enough of a reference in a peer-trust environment? It seems to me that there should be something more than that, in the worn-over double speak of media there should be a sense of "shared values and ideals" that can be added as another determinant of rank for an individual user, or a peer review (slashdot style) system that gave differing weights to different referral sources in different subject area's. I am not saying this is at all practical or possible- i could lay out a plethora of reasons for why it is impossible, it just seems to make more sense.
It seems like there should be a way to create a consolence of self publishing (blogs) and "small world" networks (freindster, etc) that would allow for micro search engines to adapt to individual users "taste trust" networks. For instance, when looking for new bands to check out, I often start by looking and my friends blog's (or people whom i likes blog's etc) and then jump off from there to their links to blog entries that may be music related. It seems like this theme is linked in some way to RSS feeds and even old school web-rings. The more i think of it, the feeds may be an interesting point moving forward in the idea of "taste trust" networks, unfortunately it is one that I hardly understand. Selah.
ps- do you think that it is on bill gates orders that google registers as a misspelled word in M$ Word?
Posted by thickeye at January 23, 2004 01:07 AM