Google: Human Editing or Technical Scrubbing
February 7, 2009
Carlo Longino, writing in TechDirt here, reported a story that caught my attention. I don’t know if the story is on the money, but it raised some interesting questions for me. The article was "Google Accused of Invisibly Deleting Blog Posts on the RIAA’s Say So". The assertion is that some Web log posts about an RIAA action have been deleted. For me the most interesting comment was:
Google says that it notifies bloggers after their posts have been taken down, in accordance with the DMCA. But it should hardly be surprising that many of those affected say they’ve gotten no such notice, nor that the offending material was either legally posted and/or supplied by the labels themselves.
What ran through my mind this morning as I bundled debris from the fallen trees that block my path from nest to goose pond were:
- What’s so surprising? Google is no longer a wonky start up. The outfit is now disrupting business sectors from telecommunications to online payments, from content distribution to video production. In order to keep potential partners and advertisers happy, why not tweak the corpus? I do it when I delete from the comments to this Web log plugs for financial services.
- Could the disappearing content be another of Google’s technical glitches? I can see a script containing errant instructions. The Googleplex crunches forward, hacking down certain references to forbidden Web sites and other subjects on the stop list. In the last couple of weeks, the GOOG has marked every Web site as malware and roached some ad statistics. No big surprise that as Google gets larger, the superior beings of the early Googlers are now diluted with less prescient coders. Ergo, mistakes in run-of-the-mill filtering.
- Hasn’t Google been hand fiddling with results for a long time? I recall reading that there was a human touch in some of the Google News displays. Algorithms weren’t, as I thought I heard, sufficiently sensitive to the needs of the dead tree newspaper crowd. Most "search systems" provide tools to permit editing, hit boosting, tuning, and other bits of magic that the search pundits remain blissfully ignorant.
You may have a different view of this situation, but I think it is par for this particular golf course. What do you think? Maybe I’m jaded, but results shaping is not an oddity; it is part of the search and retrieval game.
Stephen Arnold, February 7, 2009
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