Being googled

Interesting article on Herald Tribune website  with a critical point of view on Google:

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But the fact that Google won't say exactly how it does it raises some eyebrows. After all, the order in which a search engine presents its results largely determines where Internet users will look. Chances are that you click on the first links that are displayed and rarely if ever get down to the last page of results. The ability to direct where millions of people go on the Web puts a lot of power in Google's hands.

Google's director of corporate communications, David Krane, demurs.

"Google itself doesn't possess any power," Krane said by telephone from Mountain View, California. "We built a system that's totally automatic, so humans aren't intervening. We just have a knowledge of the Web. It's a very democratic system: What the Web determines should be the first one, two, three, four or 50th result is the result that we return to the user. Google says that the fairest way to determine who ranks at the top for a particular search query is to let the Web determine that as a whole."

But Daniel Brandt, a Google critic who runs www.google-watch.org, complains that Google's method "doesn't work very well on sites that are atypical," particularly large sites that are generated from databases, where key information tends to be on a deep page, not the site's home page. Brandt's main Web site, www.namebase.org, has 104,000 pages of publicly available information on famous individuals, he said, but is undervalued by Google's search algorithm.

"The problem with Google," Brandt said by phone from San Antonio, Texas, "is that they don't want to fix anything unless they can fix it by algorithm" - that is, automatically.

Krane, the Google spokesman, acknowledged that Google's Web search, which uses a crawler nicknamed Google-bot, isn't perfect. But neither is any other, he said.
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The most intriguing and interesting part is this one:

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Another potential problem is privacy. Google deposits cookies on your computer that keep track of the search terms you've been looking for. What's more, this month Google bought Pyra Networks, the company behind blogger.com, which makes it easy to create blogs - a kind of Web journal - and post them on the Internet. The acquisition could make more personal information available to Google.

Krane said Google's interest in blogs was simply to broaden its information base for Web searches. There is no evidence that Google has improperly used either its virtual monopoly over Web searching or the personal information it gathers. But there is potential for mischief - or worse.

"Google is collecting a lot of information," said Brandt, the Google critic, "and they are not being required to say what their plans are for how long they keep this information or who they give it to. They are probably collecting this information for profiling purposes, to increase their advertising possibilities. As far as I know, they aren't using personal profiles for ad targeting yet. But I think that's right around the corner."

Krane said, "We do not have plans to do this."

Google has issued a statement on its use of cookies and the personal information they contain, saying, "Google does not share nonaggregate user information with third parties and we treat the integrity and security of user information seriously."

Google uses the data to assess the quality of its searches, Krane said. Is the user satisfied with the first link that is provided? If not, do the search results need tweaking?

Everyone should be aware that under the USA Patriot Act of 2001, anything you enter into a search engine can be obtained by the government merely by telling a judge "that the spying could lead to information that is 'relevant' to a criminal investigation," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There is no requirement for probable cause, and "the person spied on does not have to be the target of the investigation," the foundation said.

Krane said he could not comment because "this involves something that is beyond Google business." But complying with the law is "certainly something that we do," he added.

So, in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's words, "Be careful what you put in that Google search."
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