Andy's Mind

My recent little post has spawned a debate in the combox essentially about whether Mr. Brin is right supporting homosexual “marriage” or not. However, my main point is not whether this is good or bad – after all Mr. Brin is entitled to his opinion just like everyone else. But, he somehow felt that his own name is not enough, that he has to make it his company’s official position. My main point was that this action is bad and has serious implications.

For example all Google employees who are Muslim or christian or just believe differently than Mr. Brin find themselves in a strange position of working for a company that has an official position on a moral and political issue that is strongly against their own. One could say this is their problem, but I find this troubling.

Is it right for a company manager or even founder to impose his views on all of his workforce in this way? Isn’t this arrogance (as rightly pointed out by CMR)? After all he is not representing those people in any way when it comes to issues like this one. Would it be ok if Mr. Brin said that it is official Google position to support Obama or McCain for president? Would that mean he represents the votes of his employees?

Again, I believe private corporations should be allowed to hire whoever they want or do jobs/projects they want (so I find a recent case of prosecuting a photographer for not wanting to cover a homosexual “marriage” outrageous) or have their own criteria for benefits etc. But all this is quite different from publicly weighting on a piece of legislation pertaining to moral or social questions.

Next, someone called me paranoid for even suggesting that Google’s search results and not only results might be affected by their management’s views. A few words on this one too.

First, please notice that over-reliance on Google can affect your worldview anyway – which is something I wrote about long ago. Notice too, that Google is dealing with lots of content, they are not only delivering search – they also host web sites, they host videos, they host groups, they gather and process news (through news.google.com) etc. They have immense power over what is getting through to the majority of Internet users, especially in the English-speaking countries. This power goes unnoticed, people concentrate on press and TV – but truth is newspapers circulation is down, and TV is evolving towards Internet, not away from it.

Now, call me paranoid all you want, but I find this combination of power and strong political views troubling. I have no proof that Google is meddling with search results as such, but considering supportive evidence I don’t think one can rule this out and continue to trust them.

What supportive evidence? Well, there is even a page on Wikipedia devoted to Google’s censorship and you can easily find cases of troubling disappearances of content from Google’s sites:

• Censored by Google Alerts – Crossed Crocodiles on AFRICOM,
• Google Censors Media Outlet Supportive of UN Whistleblowers.

Then there is the case of Google’s refusal to run pro-life ads while at the same time running abortion clinics ads. This is clearly using the power they have over what contents get through according to their own beliefs and views.

Reasons why all those things happen might be different, but those are all examples of power Google has over content. As I wrote above – add strong opinions to power and trouble is likely.

To sum it all up: I think Mr. Brin has stepped over the line he shouldn’t have crossed. At least for me it means I can’t trust Google anymore to provide fair and equal treatment to all opinions in their handling of web content.

Following my last post a friend told me that switching to Microsoft’s Live Search was not the best idea and I should research other options. So I did, looking specifically for sites that are new and different (because, after all, it is quite possible that in the Google’s shadow a novel and better idea for retrieving information from the Web could be emerging yet unnoticed).

Of the sites I’ve found I reviewed the following: Cuil, Powerset, Clusty, Jux2 and Viewzi.

Of those I like Clusty and Viewzi most.

Powerset is merely an interface to Wikipedia, which is, I think, rather pointless as Wikipedia has a great interface already.

Jux2 simply combines results from Google, Yahoo and Live Search in one Google-ish list of results. It has one feature that can be handy for SEO types – it displays rank of each of the results in each of the original engines. But, I think, there are many SEO tools that do it much better than Jux2 and other than this it is unimpressive. Thumbs down on this one, too.

Cuil is interesting, however the results are ordered in a way I don’t get. How Cuil ranks the results (determines what is important and what is not) is clearly different from other engines, which is a big plus (shows some innovative thinking). I’m not sure, though, I like the effect, because what was ranked best was not what I’d describe as best. On the other hand on my test searches Cuil did return a few pages no other engine did, which is another advantage. This means I’ll keep Cuil in my Firefox search box for those extensive searches when I really want to unearth any piece of info on a given topic that I can lay my eyes on.

Clusty on the other hand tries to organize the results in groups it calls clusters. On some of my test searches they were helpful, on some they were meaningless, but I think they are a good idea overall. The tab with domains is a nice way to see at a glance where there are many sites about a given topic, which is also nice.

Clusty is merely organizing results from other search engines, but it offers different profiled searches – searches for jobs, blogs, images etc. – using different source engines, which makes results interesting. Good starting point, I’d say, when looking for something on the web – especially if you don’t want to see it through Google’s goggles (Google is not included as one of the source engines).

Last of the engines I reviewed today – Viewzi – is different only by its user interface. While it is largely Flash powered (which is a drawback) it is kind of cool. It offers different graphical views for presenting the results and really I like the Web Screenshot view. It allows you to see the pages found without opening them in other windows or tabs, which makes it much much easier to decide at a glance whether a given page is worth a visit or not. Nice for lazy evening searches. 🙂

Last but not least there is our own little experiment at searching – the Sprinters Search. While not as useful as the sites above – after all this is just a concept demonstrator – it shows what I’d like a search engine to do – recognize what I’m after and explain to me what it is, while at the same time return the traditional relevant page results.

In any case – it is good we are not stuck with Google. Let’s not allow our mental inertia and habit to use only them – let’s look around for search companies that just provide searches – not try to shape the society.

I’m happy to announce that on August 2nd me and Joanna got married at the Our Saviour Church in Cracow, Poland. It was the happiest day of my life and we both look forward to our lives together.

Here are some pictures from the post-wedding photo session.

Media have announced with much ado the landing of the Phoenix Mars probe, one newspaper going so far as to say “we have landed on Mars”. Well, in fact “we” have landed nowhere – this is just an automatic drone that will be digging some ground and doing some experiments on it, after which it will be effectively a webcam on Mars (for some time).

Now, this would have been a great achievement in the early seventies or late sixties. It was a great achievement when the Viking crafts landed on Mars. It is nothing to be proud of that three decades later all we are capable of as a civilization is sending just another robot. This lander may be more sophisticated than the Vikings but it weights roughly half their weight (350 kg vs. 572 kg) – which means we can now haul less mass to Mars surface than 30 years ago! And it will have more sensors etc. but what it will in fact do will be a large repeat of Vikings – dig some soil, analyze it, snap some pictures around, measure the winds.

The sad fact is that no man left low Earth orbit since December 1972 when the last Apollo mission was launched. And even the probes sent are less numerous and smaller than those sent thirty years ago. The space programs of major Earth powers have went stale or were abandoned. NASA facilities in Cape Canaveral smell like an old museum and they in fact are one. Shuttles were a failure, even though no one admits that and no replacement is in sight. The most powerful launch vehicle developed – the Russian Energia rocket – was abandoned too.

I don’t know why it is so, why our progress into space is held back. There may be many reasons for that – ranging from social to all kinds of conspiracy theories. However, in any case I can’t stand media applauding menial landings of small probes as great achievements. This is not fair and real journalism as it lacks historical background that would put those “achievements” in prospective.