alt Hacker NewsThe Absent Silence (2010)
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She says so eloquently what is such an obvious crime against consumers that we tolerate because we must. Modern serfdom is when “trust” turns to “must”.
For Google, back in 2010, word order didn't matter much outside of quotes. So if you asked God is silence, the "is" is discarded, and you get a join of a search for "God" and "silence", sorted by rank. That probably won't help.
Try it today, and see what Google's AI turns up. It's amusing. It's still not what LeGuin is looking for. Search for "god is the silence of the universe" in quotes, and while Google does find a Saramago reference, the AI reframes the concept in Christian terms.
Now try
"god is the silence of the universe" atheist
> So the corporation can and will keep its secrets, even though what it is dealing in is information, even when its business is making knowledge accessible, open, free — the very opposite of keeping secrets.
Oh yeah, I had forgotten Google used to espouse that. Almost seems quaint now. Was it a ruse all along? Or an ideal later betrayed when they were seduced by the siren song of revenue? Or simply a double standard: making YOUR information freely available but OURS not so much?
Search should be a public service, open and transparent, funded by tax revenue, and maintained for the public good. It is too important a service these days to leave it up to profiteers (who have repeatedly demonstrated they are not responsible or responsive stewards of the public good).
The mistake is thinking of Google as a library. Google is a commercial product. The equivalent of the Library of Congress would be something more like Wikipedia, or the Internet Archive, or Library Genesis.
I certainly think that we should be spending more resources as a civilization on storing and categorizing human knowledge in a more systematic and not-for-profit way. Expecting a for-profit corporation to do that is just a category error. I'm not saying this in an anti-capitalist sense; I'm in favor of for-profit corporations. People have unrealistic expectations about what they can or should accomplish.
The mistake is in expecting anything positive from a company, brand or celebrity. And then phrasing it as if it's a problem?
Brilliant quote!
It appears to me that comrade LeGuin is being rather willfully ignorant here. The detailed implementation of the algorithm is not public, but the basic concept - download every webpage, index by keywords, rank by number of links - is well known and had been well known for some time even in 2010. LeGuin could have, well, googled it. But then she wouldn't have gotten an anti-capitalist essay out of her ignorance.
i read about pagerank in first year computer science. but her point stands
> it’s as if a great library, say the Library of Congress, refused to tell where they got their books and how they got their books and who chose the books and whether all the books they had were in the catalogue and available or some were held back, kept secret.
I think "proprietary" is a better descriptor for Google Search's inner machinations, than "secret". The general concept of engineering a search crawler is well-trodden. Many companies have done it, there are open-source examples, and Google themselves have written blogs about their own.
It would probably be more apt to say, we know where the books came from and how they were acquired, we just don't necessarily know how the archive shelves in the basement are arranged and we don't know which employee is responsible for organizing them and we don't have the source code to the library's LMS. (All of which is true, by the way, for the LOC.) Proprietary, not secret.