Does Google = God? 294
lgreco writes "In an op/ed for the NYT, Thomas Friedman wonders "Is Google God?" Interesting article that disseminates things mostly known to and hopefully well understood by the Slashdot readership. The fact that such commentary made it to the NYT op/ed pages is remarkable." It's the NYT, so a free registration is required.
Yes, google is god (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is god.... but (Score:1, Interesting)
And if now we use the "GooglePower" to find some information remember when we used altavista [altavista.com] or metacrawler [metacrawler.com].
There is also more and more fake hits on google.
Sometimes you have to browse 2-3 pages of results before finding a real result.
Because everybody is using the power of google to raise up is site.
Because a site that's not in google will never be seen...
But the google bot are really powerfull, thay can even read in any file format. They will propably find once: "What is the Matrix..."
Really an attempt to spread fear? (Score:2, Interesting)
If I was a more suspicious person (or paranoid) I would think this was really an veiled attempt to scare people into being afraid of the big-bad Internat and its ability to link like minded people of various hatreds to each other in ways not before seen. Want to get permission to crack down on free-speach on the Internet? Articles like this will "encourage" people to think that's what is going to happen. After all, heaven forbid that Osama's recruiting video may be streamed on the Internet and it (according to the author) is very motivating.
Sounds like "Internet breads terrorism, we should all be afraid". Just what is needed before "we need to control what's on the internet to protect everyong" starts being said.
Re:Google IS God (Score:3, Interesting)
I just thought it was interesting that google is tracking slashdot articles in the same way as cnn and nyt.
No, but Google IS Multivac... (Score:5, Interesting)
In the sixties and early seventies, people were awed but poorly informed about computers. The commonest question that "lay" friends and relatives would ask me is "But what do you DO with a computer? Do you ask it questions?" That seemed bizarrely naive to me, and I would try to explain that it was more like playing with an electric train set, and that, outside of jokes, or Asimov's "Multivac" stories, you didn't "ask questions" of a computer.
Well, Google may not be Multivac, but it sure is a lot more like Multivac than H. G. Well's space gun or Cavorite sphere is like Project Apollo. You don't normally phrase the questions as questions, and it doesn't provide interpretative, English-language "answers," but it certainly is an awesome and it may not be omniscient but it's an order of magnitude more "scient" than anything else I've seen.
And, yes, it FINALLY looks as if "flat TV you can hang on a wall" is not only here, but I expect I'll be buying one within the next five years or so.
No helicars or voice typewriters yet, though.
(No, ViaVoice is NOT a good realization of the "voicewriter" fantasy. Oh, and for the record, to me, "Ask Jeeves" does NOT feel like Multivac at all, but Google does. I can't say why, that's just the way it strikes me.)
Hitchikers Guide 2 Galaxy (Score:5, Interesting)
cu,
Lispy
Re:Read the article :) (Score:3, Interesting)
Real point: Friedman's fear and loathing (Score:5, Interesting)
And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us -- whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet -- more than ever.
The point is more fear and paranoiac fantasies as only Thomas Friedman can spin, with an evil-doer under every rock, a terrorist behind every tree and, now, a rabid, sweaty-toothed madman coming to get us behind every keyboard.
From his lofty perch high atop the NY Times, Friedman has seen a career revival thanks to 9/11, winning a Pulitzer for his turgid writing about the event and its effects. When Friedman gets basic facts just plain wrong, it makes you wonder how much else he gets wrong, or otherwise intentionally distorts or misrepresents just so he can make everyone see the world through his lens where terrorists will get all of us.
Examples?
VeriSign, which operates much of the Internet's infrastructure...
and
A domain request is anytime anyone types in .com or .net
Really? The last time I checked VeriSign was only responsible for maintaining the .com and .net registries, as well as most SSL certificate services. There are 243 country code top-level domains [iana.org], plus the .org TLD [pir.org], not just .com and .net. The way Friedman makes it sound it's as if there's nothing else out there, and I'm not sure which is worse: that he was too lazy or too apathetic to talk to anyone other than VeriSign to get a basic understanding of the Internet to accurately write about it for his many non-technical readers.
These are basic facts and are simple to check. Any journalism student can do this so why doesn't Friedman?
Given his penchant for hyperbole in overstating the negative consequences of everything and minimizing the positives, it's no surprise that Friedman has completely missed the fact that the same technologies he fears are just as capable of opening up communications. He says that while the world is growing more integrated and what the world thinks about the USA will matter more, the USA is becoming ideologically isolationist and it doesn't need to heed what the rest of the world tells it. Proliferation of the Internet facilitates the free exchange of ideas that can result in better understanding and relations with the rest of the world, which Friedman apparently believes is full of nothing but some sort of irrational monolithic hatred.
When Friedman takes such a reductionist view of the world that amounts to Us vs. Them, is it any wonder that all Friedman can see are terrorists, terrorists everywhere and not a refuge in sight.
When the only tool you have is a hammer the whole world looks like a nail.
Re:No, but Google IS Multivac... (Score:3, Interesting)
God? (Score:4, Interesting)
What a goofy term. The answer is necessarily yes and no at the same time because God means something different to everyone.
To me, God is a name for entropy, the thing that makes life random, though only because we cannot detect and account for it in a meaningful fashion, in most cases. The devil is in the details, and it don't get any more detailed than entropy. Mind you, I think the Devil and God are just different sides of the same thing; entropy that hurts you, and entropy that works in your favor.
Google is the opposite of entropy. It helps us bring order to chaos. It's a really good automatically generated index (while Yahoo and DMOZ and similar sites are tables of contents) and nothing more.
Now if you want to get into a more metaphysical discussion, google helps make us more than we are because knowledge is power but only if you can get your hands on it and use it. Google puts more information at our fingertips. Someday when we're communicating with our computer implants via thought (or perhaps subvocalization, at least sooner than thought) it's going to be an indexing system (or several of them) that lets us make concise queries and get a relevant answer back, just as it is today, and that certainly seems godlike. Imagine being stuck in bumfuck nowhere and being able to just sort of ask the air what to do. Talk about talking to god. Of course, you're just accessing a network, but what is God anyway? Which just brings us back to how silly the name of the article is.
Reality Check (Score:3, Interesting)
AllTheWeb indexes more documents.
Microsoft has decided to compete with Google.
Yes Google is a cool search engine, but come on folks, you get the same top ten results from even the weakest sites.
Google is a Bishop, at Best (Score:2, Interesting)
Several Other Results (Score:3, Interesting)
google is a search engine = about 1,630,000 results
google sucks = about 137,000 results
google is Shiva = about 9,440 results
google is a tuna fish sandwich = about 851
Somewhat circular, but that aside, I think Google's nature is reasonably clear.
Re:Yes, google is god (Score:4, Interesting)
I think Google is an emerging AI. Most AI research (like OpenCyc [opencyc.com]) involves a rule-engine and a HUGE data set. Eventually, the manual data entry (and fact-checking) of new rules is a huge road block.
I think Google's huge database of knowledge (the Internet) could be tied to an AI engine front-end. Suddenly, the data entry of new rules is massively parallelized! Sure the Internet is full of spam, ads, pr0n, lies, missing data, and conflicting statements, but Google's PageRank already does a good job of filtering these out. The Internet's redundant "multipe truth" nature is self-correcting. Human intelligences must face those same knowledge-input problems, too.
So be careful what you say on the Internet, because Google Is Watching...
Re:Yes, google is god (Score:3, Interesting)
I think P2P networks are more likely to form an AI than Google is. As P2P networks improve in finding relationships between data on different nodes and passing that data around I think it could form something very interesting. Since little of the data shared by P2P networks is text (most is images, music, and movies) it has considerable source material to learn from. Also with the large number of nodes a good P2P network has at it's disposal far more computing power than Google does.
I've had AI projects before that learned from the Net and they did tend to be kind of perverted but they also quickly built an amazing array of knowledge. I've had programs that (without being programmed to do so) began translating text into other languages or that would feed back word definitions from text you fed them. The most interesting ones (to me) have their front end dropped into a virtual world (such as a mud) and will learn to identify users they like and will learn to identify how to respond to what the user says or does so as to please that user. So for a certain user the program might translate all text they entered, for another it might treat the input as a search query and return the most promising results from Google.