[Air-l] counting google hits

[Thomas Koenig]

At 15:11 04/03/2005, Ulla Bunz wrote:
>I've been reading about google hits and checking spelling and students using
>google for research (which I find somewhat troublesome), and I'd like to
>recommend EPIC to you. Check it out here: http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/

It's always difficult to predict the future, but this movie contains too 
many "good ol' times" bias' in my view. I like the NYT, but undoubtly 
Google (even though it's a quasi-monopoly) is a more "democratic" news 
source than any newspaper, let alone any broadcaster. Also, the NYT 
currently sells about 1.1 Million copies, The Sun has 3.4 Million in a 
country a quarter the size of the US. You figure, if the Sun is a desirable 
news source, which supports democratic citizenship. Need I spell another 
three-letter-word: FOX.

The film celebrates "journalistic professionalism", although many scholars 
(Tuchman, Gans, Gitlin immediately spring to mind) have shown that these 
professional norms systematically exclude certain news sources, issues and 
events. Why would a search engine, which indexes a much wider variety of 
sources be more rather than less biased?

The film also contains a number of factual errors, such as:

"Google's algorithm is based on amazon's"

The principle of the evaluation of links certainly preceeds amazon, and 
Google's principle sorting mechanism is very different from amazon's (in 
1998), which then  did have recommendations, but did not order search 
results through link evaluation and clustering techniques.

"Google News is edited entirely by computers"

That's a semantic trick. Google News is based on newswires and other news 
providers, which do have human editors.

"All the news on EPIC are sensationalist".

Current print/broadcast media also prefer event-centred coverage over 
issue-oriented coverage (see, eg., Iyangar's "Is anyone responsible"). I 
cannot see, why "issue-oriented reporting" should be the domain of 
journalists only? Au contraire, there are many citizens with particular 
policy interests, which offer much more thematic news than any news wire 
does. Unlike the press, these citizens are not so much driven by market 
forces, which lead journalists in the traditional mass media to "eposidic" 
reporting.

A few words on media market concentration the movie loathes so much. In 
general, of course, market concentration is a bad thing for product variety 
(read: range of opinions in communication terms). But Google does not edit 
the contents (safe for a few webpaes on Google itself produces), but just 
indexes them quite efficiently. It provides thus the infrastructure to 
effiently access all sorts of news sites. I know of no goverment or 
open-surce project, which does it more "balanced".

Just my 2c.

Thomas

thomas koenig, ph.d.
department of social sciences, loughborough university
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/index.html