Digging for Googleholes
Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.
By Steven Johnson
Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 8:39 AM PT
The arrival of Google five years ago served as a kind of upgrade for the entire Web. Searching for information went from a sluggish, unreliable process to something you could do with genuine confidence. If it was online somewhere, Google and its ingenious PageRank system would find what you were looking for—and more often than not, the information would arrive in Google's top 10 results.
But the oracle—recently described as "a little bit like God" in the New York Times—is not perfect. Certain types of requests foil the Google search system or produce results that frustrate more than satisfy. These are systemic problems, not isolated ones; you can reproduce them again and again. The algorithms that Google's search engine relies on have been brilliantly optimized for most types of information requests, but sometimes that optimization backfires. That's when you find yourself in a Googlehole.
Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time. If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists. If you're doing research on tulips, or want to learn gardening tips, or basically want to know anything about flowers that doesn't involve purchasing them online, you have to wade through a sea of florists to find what you're looking for.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/
Google may be our new god, but it's not omnipotent.
By Steven Johnson
Posted Wednesday, July 16, 2003, at 8:39 AM PT
The arrival of Google five years ago served as a kind of upgrade for the entire Web. Searching for information went from a sluggish, unreliable process to something you could do with genuine confidence. If it was online somewhere, Google and its ingenious PageRank system would find what you were looking for—and more often than not, the information would arrive in Google's top 10 results.
But the oracle—recently described as "a little bit like God" in the New York Times—is not perfect. Certain types of requests foil the Google search system or produce results that frustrate more than satisfy. These are systemic problems, not isolated ones; you can reproduce them again and again. The algorithms that Google's search engine relies on have been brilliantly optimized for most types of information requests, but sometimes that optimization backfires. That's when you find yourself in a Googlehole.
Googlehole No. 1: All Shopping, All the Time. If you're searching for something that can be sold online, Google's top results skew very heavily toward stores, and away from general information. Search for "flowers," and more than 90 percent of the top results are online florists. If you're doing research on tulips, or want to learn gardening tips, or basically want to know anything about flowers that doesn't involve purchasing them online, you have to wade through a sea of florists to find what you're looking for.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/