GOOGLE IS BIGGER THAN WAL-MART…
OK, so strictly speaking, this isn’t about Wal-Mart, but when I saw the headline this morning it gave me pause. Google is much more than a search engine. The company is a multi-national media giant and what do any of us know about the people who run it?
What Wal-Mart did for cheap plastic crap, Google could do for information.
Consider this Wired article from 2005:
On one hand, you have a company that rose up from modest beginnings to become one of the richest businesses in America (indeed, the world), and in the process revolutionized the use of technology to create a new way to do business — helping people find what they want.
And then you have Google.
It turns out that Wal-Mart, the world’s most profitable retailer, and Google, the virtual world’s most profitable search seller, have a lot more in common than you might think.
Our detractors like to ask why we focus on Wal-Mart and my answer is that when you get to be as big as Wal-Mart, every misstep can have momentous consequences.
So who’s going to start the Google blog?
Well I haven’t started a Google blog, but I do have an essay about the problems that it’s market share can cause.
The gist is that the three search firms (Google, MS and Yahoo) form a shared monopoly over the access to information. If they chose not to index a site, or index it improperly it is, effectively, invisible. This has turned out not be a theoretical concern as these firms have already started to cooperate with China by tailoring their search databases to enhance China’s censorship policies.
Here’s the essay, for those interested:
Google and the Dissemination of Knowledge
The first of the two linked essays deals with the political issues while the second deals with some technical problems with information retrieval.
In a prior age censors would have to find every copy of a banned book, but with more and more information only available online, just altering a small number of gateways can do the job better.
Shalom Robert,
Thank you.
I see the issue of censorship as harder electronically. Yes, it is possible, as in the case of Burma/Myanmar, to shut down the whole system, but once an individual piece of information gets out there, it’s near feckin’ impossible to take down every copy.
We have an example of that here in Cleveland. Several years ago Sharon Reed, one of our TV news anchors, an attractive Black woman, disrobed on camera to take part in a photo shoot by Spencer Tunick. Of late the station has been trying to get all the video captures of its own broadcast taken down and has had very poor success.
Once it’s out there, it’s out there.
B'shalom,
Jeff
[...] GOOGLE IS BIGGER THAN WAL-MART… OK, so strictly speaking, this isn’t about Wal-Mart, but when I saw the headline this morning it gave me pause. Google is much more than a search engine. The company is a multi-national media giant and what do any of us know about the people who run it? Keep reading… [...]