[Air-l] net neutrality by another name, oecd report

Hugemusic hmusic at ozemail.com.au
Sun Apr 29 19:14:37 PDT 2007


Sure ... and Apple have said they are investigating ways to avoid/avert this 
problem.

It seems that the problem is, at least in part, driven by the compromise 
between fast searching service and deep searching service - in other words, 
they err on the side of timing out with no results from the cache rather 
than searching the deep database. There is no bug report, just a 0 result 
and this result was reproduced by several list members on searches for their 
own catalogues, which were known to be present in iTunes.  I'm not sure the 
other sites you mention have the same priorities when they consider their 
design compromises. Or perhaps it's just that no-one notices   :-)

It nonetheless represents an opportunity for market manipulation by database 
owners, which is anathema to the notion of "search neutrality", which is a 
premise of the Long Tail theory and a cherished ideal among web activists. 
Even worse, the example of "The Lord's Prayer" demonstrates how, even when 
the search system is working technically correctly, this effect acts to the 
benefit of hegemons and the detriment of new entrants or niche artists.

Cheers,
Hughie

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <elw at stderr.org>
To: <>; "Hugemusic" <hmusic at ozemail.com.au>
Sent: Monday, April 30, 2007 11:12 AM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] net neutrality by another name, oecd report


>
>> Large music databases, iTunes, CDBaby, Amazon, etc, use a cacheing device 
>> to improve the efficiency of their searches.  This device makes the most 
>> popular search results more readily available than the rest, which works 
>> well for most searches (on a zipf curve distribution). However, it 
>> significantly disadvantages the less-popular artists/results - to the 
>> point of virtual exclusion - for example, on searches for versions of 
>> "The Lord's Prayer" in iTunes, in which the versions by the more popular 
>> artists drown the versions by less popular artists ...
>
>
> That's likely a bug in their particular software implementation, not a bug 
> in the intellectual idea of database caches.
>
> What *should* happen, should your search not result in any hits in the 
> cache, is that the site's software issues a hugely more expensive search 
> against the whole dataset.  If you're seeing a truncation due to a 
> particular search term being less than popular, it seems likely that the 
> site operators would appreciate the generation of a reproducible bug 
> report.
>
> Several sites (livejournal, citeulike, etc) use memcached for this sort of 
> database caching - and it doesn't seem to have the 'ill' mis-behavior that 
> you're describing.
>
> --e
> 




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