Google and What You Cannot Find

July 7, 2014

I don’t have much information about the “right to be forgotten” process at the GOOG. I have been watching the streams my Overflight system tracks. I did find one Web page that I found interesting. Navigate to Forgotten Results.

You can explore the links and the source for each entry. I clicked on a few and found the information suggestive, not definitive. I did a couple of quick checks and the content for which I looked was available via other indexes or from other Google domains when I used a Web proxy.

For most users, information not in the Google index does not exist. The approach is, I think, “Hey, Google indexes all the world’s information, right?”

Sort of.

You can ponder the value of being able to delete certain information from online indexes used to satisfy a Web query. My hunch is that some outfits who continue to grouse about Google (maybe, Foundem), certain types of content (information not deemed to be high priority), and other digital information can be deleted. Most folks won’t know the difference.

Keep in mind that among the people who are online searchers, almost everyone is an expert in their own mind. There are professionals like Marydee Ojala, Barbara Quint, Anne Mintz, and Ruth Pagell who are significantly more “expert” than the over confident MBAs, mobile phone search wizards, search engine optimization gurus, and the majority of short cut focused college students chasing a library or information science degree.

What’s important to me is that it is now possible to be confident that locating information on mind becomes much harder. Multiple queries and different search systems must be used. Will Bing maps show you the location of a certain facility in Scotland? Why are some government servers not in the USA.gov service? Why is Yahoo’s presentation of the “news” focused squarely on the inconsequential and stale?

The question about Google is a pretty good one. In our tests, identical queries across different search systems generate anywhere from 60 to 75 percent overlap. Flip this around and you will have to work really hard to find the other 25 to 40 percent.

Research is hard work. The right to be forgotten just ups the ante for specialists in open source online research. I suppose that’s one reason my intel conference briefings on alternatives to Google.com search continues to pack ’em in.

Stephen E Arnold, July 7, 2014

Comments

4 Responses to “Google and What You Cannot Find”

  1. Marydee Ojala on July 13th, 2014 8:43 am

    Apparently GOOG hasn’t removed stories from its database only from its index. If a story mentions Marydee Ojala and Anne Mintz and Anne would rather be forgotten, a search on her name will not pull up the story but a search on my name likely will pull up the “forgotten” story. Not, of course, guaranteed, but so far that’s what it looks like. We’ll have more about this at WebSearch University (websearchu.com) in September.

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