60 Minutes Segment on Google
The story is overripe at this point, but if you haven’t seen the 60 Minutes piece on Google (sprinkled with Battelle) it’s worth a look: video (divx). Some interesting excerpts:
There was something else different about Google: the company motto, “Do no evil.”
“We have tried to boil it down at some point to a code of conduct, so to speak,” Brin says. “How do we make all our decisions. For example, we don’t mix our ads with our search results. We always label the advertising clearly down the side of the page.”
To this day, Google has still never run a TV commercial. Their popularity has spread literally by word of mouth around the world, as people everywhere search for everything under the sun.
That includes the term “60 Minutes,” for which Google’s computers return 19 million search results in one-fifth of a second. But at first glance, the top results are all related to “60 Minutes” stories that have created some kind of controversy. And that’s a big problem with Google: Its ranking system tends to put negative events or statements at the top of the list.
And if you Google a person, Battelle says, the picture you’ll get is, “an entirely skewed one, in my opinion. When anybody puts in a name, and that person has had a terrible event… that will become who she is in the world.”
“As hard as we try,” Schmidt says, “we have not yet understood how to make value and moral judgments about information. And we can’t distinguish between hugely popular accurate information and hugely popular dated information.”
Two pretty big points in a row. The second shows that Google is acutely aware of the current limitations. The basic democratic concept driving Google results is prone to become victim to, as Plato put it, the appetitive desires. But do we really want Google-brand philosopher kings? Heck, according to them it’s a role they avoid (delegating it to machines), so perhaps they fit the model too well. There was recently an important exchange on this WRT Wikipedia, but I will go over that more in depth some time in the next day or two.
Battelle mentions a pretty cool future at the end of the segment:
And if that’s not science-fiction enough, Battelle describes another advance potentially on the not-so-distant horizon. Users would, he says, “have a device which is in your pocket, which looks like a phone, and you go to a supermarket and you see a potentially overpriced box of pasta. And you take that device and you wand it over the product code, and you see comparison prices from Google of three other stores that are within a mile, OK? That’s power. That’s search. But no one has quite figured out that. That’s also the future.