Life before Google: History from Gen X
September 7, 2008
When I am in the UK, I enjoy reading the London papers. The Guardian often runs interesting and quirky stories. My newsreader delivered to me “Life before Google” by Kevin Anderson who was in college in the 1990s. Ah. Gen X history. I dived right in, and you may want to read this article here. After a chronological run down of Web search (happily ignoring the pre-Web search systems), Mr. Anderson wrote:
Using the almost 250 year-old theories British mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, Page and Brin developed an algorithm to analyse the links to a site, helping to predict what sites were relevant to search terms.
This is a comment that is almost certain to catch the attention of Autonomy, the British vendor that has claimed Bayesian methods as its core technology.
Then Mr. Anderson added:
Google hasn’t solved search. There is still the so-called dark web, or deep web – terabytes of data that aren’t searchable or indexed.
Mr. Anderson, despite his keen Gen X intellect, overlooked Google’s Programmable Search Engine inventions or this query on Google. air schedule LGA SFO. The result displayed is
What you are looking as is a “deep Web” search result. Mr. Anderson also overlooked the results for Baltimore condo.
The results displayed when I ran this search on September 6, 2008, at 7 10 pm Eastern were:
Yep, another “deep Web” search.
What’s the problem with Gen X research for Mr. Anderson’s article? I think for this article it was shallow. Much of the analysis of Google is superficial, incomplete, and misleading in my opinion. Agree or disagree? Help me learn.
Stephen Arnold, September 7, 2008
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2 Responses to “Life before Google: History from Gen X”
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Deep web used to be close to deep-linking. If I recall correctly, there was a Danish company, Newsbooster, which has recently resurfaced again. It seems in retrospect that if they did not request a fee for subscription articles they might have been left alone by the courts. Getting to the deep web, who wouldn’t try to access subscription content for free – but the web seems built a bit tighter than years past. And so, sure you can search “IBM” site:kompass.com (for instance) but you cannot search Stephen Arnold by googling stephen arnold site:openaccess.dialog.com/business/
to find the advertised 112 titles in Computers, Electronics, and Telecom Industry News with SA’a name as on:
http://openaccess.dialog.com/business/cgi/search?Title=&Company=&Fulltext=stephen+arnold&FT=FTO&startYear=2007&endYear=2008&Search=cc%2FEW.BusIndustryComputer
Well maybe there’s a way to hack that but I haven’t tried yet. If much of the analysis of Google is superficial, incomplete, and misleading – it is because we allow systems to define analysis for us, and as we used to criticize others less “developed” for doing this, we are getting way behind the ball, any of them.
Could the country be so lucky? ,