technology & the social » search

Google circles a minefield: data are not neutral

Ericka — Thu, 14 May 2009 02:38:04 +0000

Google has recently been making an effort to “add search power to public data” so now you can google [unemployment rate] or [population] followed by a U.S. state or county and see a time line of changes over time. These data are from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division.

Along similar lines Google just announced a new tool, Google Squared that “automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet” (see full announcement) For example, “A search for “small dogs” pulls a list of small dogs organized by size, weight and breed” (read further).

These first examples are fairly uncontroversial, particularly because this is a neat new technology and not something people rely on .. yet. Just to illustrate the potential minefield that could await Google, why doesn’t the unemployment rate graph that Google provides let me break down the figure by race, for example? I’ve heard on the news that the rates are very different for African Americans and I want to look into that in my county. I know how to download data from the BLS, but most people don’t and certainly won’t. Race classification is a political issue in France, however: “Classifying people by their ethnicity is illegal in France – the nation of “liberty, equality, fraternity” considers all people should be equally French with no differentiation” (The Guardian). I hope this highlights the potential difficulties.

There are much more subtle issues that can have major consequences for how we understand information – see Tufte’s quite illuminating book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information for examples.

Google Searching is News

Ericka — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:47:20 +0000

I just added Google’s “Hot Trends” box to my iGoogle page. I’ve been interested in this kind of information since I first saw the Google Zeitgeist come out a few years ago, and the series of Current TV clips called Google Current. I haven’t seen other search engines providing this kind of info, (please leave a comment if you have). It’s an interesting way to monitor the environment. Usually expected types of terms come up, things that are in the news (hard news and quite a bit of entertainment news), but often enough there is something slightly unexpected, or at least interesting to investigate since there’s always some reason behind the trend. Today I clicked on “amantadine” and the two top news stories were about the fact that amantadine was a top Google search after last night’s “House” episode aired on TV. This certainly promotes the “rich get richer,” but I can also see the appeal of reporting on trends.

Daily Mashup – popular = good?

Ericka — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 02:29:13 +0000

As anyone who has spent much time on social content web sites (flickr, delicious, etc.) knows, or takes for granted, popular does equal good. I’m not making philosophical claims but practical ones. If many people put a bookmark or photo in their personal collection it’s pretty likely that it’s useful or at least interesting. This is not quantifiable (well, perhaps, if someone wants to take that on) but it’s easy to experience for yourself on these sites.

The Daily Mashup really has something good going on. It’s just a combination of Flickr Interesting, Delicious & Furl popular and Yahoo news most clicked. A simple daily internet zeitgeist. If I didn’t have lots of things to get done I’d make it my home page.

I’d love to have a customizable version of this with lots of display options for any feed view full text, mash up with other feeds in a cloud, pick out the popular things within several tag feeds, and so on with a nice fast ajax interface. Maybe I’ll hack something together until this exists.

To clarify, I don’t think this should be anyone’s sole interface to the web leading to tyranny of the masses. Search is still incredibly valuable & someone has to put these sites on the map in the first place and when you’re talking about specific tags you can find the rare gems also.

Google-self

Ericka — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 22:32:21 +0000

I have a unique name. I’m confident in that statement because every
result on Google for my name in quotes is actually referring to me.
It’s a strange thing to see. This is my ten year anniversary on the web
and over the years I’m sure my search engine self has changed quite a
bit, not to mention the other changes between the years of 15 and 25.
I’ve got three pages of results now, and very few of them did I think,
at the time, would become part of my google-self. I suppose that’s the
advantage is that it’s “authentic,” but I can’t help at least wanting
to re-order them a bit. Is some book review I wrote on Amazon really
the second most important thing about me? They do have the first result
right, my personal web site, so I can’t complain.

Anyway, back to transcribing interviews.