Florian Cramer on Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:33:59 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Google cranks up its Engines of Consensus |
On Saturday, December 13 2008, 01:34 (+0000), Andrew Orlowski wrote: > Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what > appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody > has yet grasped its significance. Even the original PageRank algorithm, whose patent is owned by Stanford University, is "pick and choose" in the end since it implements a human choice of how to rank importance of information; this is true for any such algorithm, be it Bayesian filters, Markov chains or what have you. Google's breakthrough as a search engine was based on the fact that a great number of users found its choice of ranking more fit to their own subjective choices of ranking. Google's claims that PageRank was somehow objective were nonsense from the beginning on (and even more dubious for news.google.com) no matter whether additional human intervention interfered with the ranking or not. It's the old cybernetic pipe dream, and the old fallacy of meta- and object level: a bot or a program is never "objective" only because human - often political or economical - choices have been made on the meta level of its design rather than on the object level of its execution. The politics of computing more often than not lies in these false beliefs (and make-beliefs) of objectivity. [And with the debates on software culture, among others on this list, of the past decade, one would think that we're beyond having to discuss this any further, aside from the fact that it can be read up among others in Joseph Weizenbaum's writings from the 1970s.] Apart from that, Google "admitted" nothing new. The company officially states that next to the PageRank algorithm, it uses 200 secret factors and methods for ranking search results <http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html>. Two months ago, Google employee Scott Huffman wrote on Google's staff blog that since 2005, he has worked "as an engineering director responsible for leading search evaluation". He makes no secret about the following: "Human evaluators. Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or 'side by side' with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions." In the same posting he states that... "today's search-engine users expect more than just relevance. Are the results fresh and timely? Are they from authoritative sources? Are they comprehensive? Are they free of spam? Are their titles and snippets descriptive enough? Do they include additional UI elements a user might find helpful for the query (maps, images, query suggestions, etc.)? Our evaluations attempt to cover each of these dimensions where appropriate." "Fourth, evaluating Google search quality requires covering an enormous breadth. We cover over a hundred locales (country/language pairs) with in-depth evaluation. Beyond locales, we support search quality teams working on many different kinds of queries and features. For example, we explicitly measure the quality of Google's spelling suggestions, universal search results, image and video searches, related query suggestions, stock oneboxes, and many, many more." More interesting stuff can be found in the blog of another Google employee who reveals how "[o]ur work on interpreting user intent is aimed at returning results people really want, not just what they said in their query". [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/technologies-behind-google-ranking.html] Florian -- http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70 gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org