The Future is Now!

Interesting editorial by Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Cukier over at the New York Times today, based around Google. I'm sure we've all used Google at some time or another; it's my favorite search engine beating out Yahoo and Excite (both of which I also use). Google is just very very easy to use. But Hindman and Cukier do point out an interesting facet of Google's success.

Behind Google's complex ranking system is a simple idea: each link to a page should be considered a vote, and the pages with the most votes should be ranked first. This elegant approach uses the distributed intelligence of Web users to determine which content is most relevant.

But what is good for Google is not necessarily good for the rest of the Web. The company's technology is so strong that its competitors have adopted a similar approach to organizing online information, which means they now return similar search results. Thus popular sites become ever more popular, while obscure sites recede ever further into the ether.

I'm not sure there's an easy answer to this question, and Hindman and Cukier don't seem to have one either. I suppose a simple answer is the market economy. If you have someone who's providing a service, do you really need other people who provide the same service? It's a tricky question. To personalize it a bit, once you have Atrios and Daily Kos and Corrente and This Modern World do you really need a Make me a Commentator?

But of course viewpoints are different than services. By their very nature, they are individualized. What I do is different than other blogs because it's me whose doing it (doesn't mean I'm better, and in some cases I'm probably worse, just different). So to ask that is kind of like saying once you have Chocolate Donuts and Bear Claws and Cheese Danishes and Maple Logs do you really need Strawberry Crullers?

Perhaps I personalize this issue too much. At any rate, it's nice to have Google to blame for the fact that I don't get a million hits a day.