Warmest Greetings,

:: Friday, January 10, 2003 ::

It's My Opinion That Counts and That's Final?

Now that the legal papers on the SearchKing vs Google are available to read (for a mere $20, mind you), some people are taking another look at Bob Massa's claims. Chris Ridings, who gained fame by unlocking the mysteries of Google PageRank, took another look and this caught my eye because it echos what others have been thinking or feeling.

"For Google no longer represent the idealised statements in their research project or on their site. They are no longer making measurements or assessing the opinion of a whole. They are beginning to be about their opinions, them, what they think and this becomes the (whether legal or moral) argument for being able to do whatever they like. Court case or not, whether they win or not, that is worrying and something that must be fundamentally changed or they will go the same as Altavista."

This fits with my own hunch that the once idealistic, Linux farm Google is going the way of other dotcoms that realized they had bills to pay. Google IS losing favor among many webmasters due to the threat of site/page penalization and low PageRank scores that appear suspiciously like censorship. Warranted or not, the very idea of what a search engine is has come under scrutiny. Search engines stopped being objective when pay for inclusion/rank dominated search results. With the possibility that Google PageRank, on an engine that doesn't charge for inclusion, is more closely related to an opinion than an actual formula-based metric, the ability to search without bias, or submit pages without fear, may be gone forever.

Click on >>> SupportForums.org Entry for January 10 to read more of Chris's ponderings on the court case.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 1/10/2003 09:14:23 AM

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