Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forFebruary 26th, 2004 | back to home

26 February 2004

Edward Felten posted defending the way Google search results are delivered, suggesting the ‘votes of web authors’ is a fair way to determine website prominence in search. This touched off an interesting argument. As one poster pointed out, “think about how you will feel when a search on evolution brings up creationist sites explaining why evolution is wrong and evil. That’s a widespread view in the U.S., currently under-represented online but that may well change as the net penetrates more deeply into society.”

I was also struck by the comment by “Armature”:http://abstractfactory.blogspot.com/ in which he points out, “One interesting side effect of Vivisimo’s clustering of search results is that Vivisimo’s less vulnerable to tyranny of the majority than Googlocracy.”