Register Refutations...

Posted April 12, 2003 2:53 PM.

A week or so ago I wrote a little post called Oh Self-Correcting Blogosphere. It was about an article at The Register in which Andrew Orlowski managed to mix a few half-facts with some general paranoia to assemble the spectre of a censorious and manipulative cabal of either webloggers or Google managers.

Orlowski's gone off on another one this week - and this one's considerably more ludicrous than the one before. This time - in the article Google washes Whiter - he's protesting that his previous article has been hidden from people who search for the word "Googlewash" on the search engine:

"Google has made its own statement on the 'Googlewash': by making The Register story that coined the phrase disappear from its search results. Not all the search results, mark you, but a very specific one. When you search for the word "Googlewash" (as at 9pm Pacific Time last night) around a hundred results are returned by default. Our story, which is where the word was coined, isn't among them. We found it, eventually, but it was very difficult."

The stunning problem with his hypothesis (which was - if you remember - that his article has been censored by Google) is that if you click on the very first link offered then you are immediately directed straight to the article in question. All that's happened is that - for some presumably totally obvious reason - Metafilter's article about Googlewashing gets higher prominence. Whether that's because Metafilter has a higher page-rank and gets linked to more often generally or whether it's because people linked to this particular discussion with more apposite keywords (like 'Googlewash' for example)- well I don't know. What I do know is that if Google were trying to hide Orlowski's 'revelations', then they've made a ludicrously bad hash of it. And if he were looking for censorship, perhaps he should be looking comparatively, since anyone with half a brain can find his article more easily through Google than via altavista or overture or alltheweb.

Comments

Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.

To be honest, I think you're exaggerating the claim that Orlowski originally made - which was essentially that a small-ish number of well-read weblogs often feed selected links down to a larger number of lesser-read weblogs, causing a mushrooming effect which will quickly result in an imbalanced PageRank that biases whatever "side of the story" is being cascaded down the blogosphere. The only flaw was that in the case of the "second superpower" definition, the original definition in the NY Times was only available via paying $2.95, which meant it was unlikely to get many links. His general point stands though. I agree that his new rant is rather more half-baked. It's no secret that Orlowski has exhibited antipathy towards weblogs in the past, but I generally find his acidic style rather refreshing compared to the usual "it's the new revolution" bollocks most publications seem to parrot.

→ Posted by: Marcus at April 12, 2003 3:35 PM

To the extent that I believe Orlowski's original claim wasn't without much merit in the first place, his second article really does mix in the hyperbole, paranoia and first-class reporting that we've come to expect from the Register, or at least, his articles in general.

Perhaps the Register has realised that Orlowski is their very own Dvorak.

→ Posted by: Dan Hon at April 12, 2003 4:02 PM

if i had a pound for every time i had read an article by someone claiming that google was censoring them or was biased against them, whilst clearly demonstrating that they have no knowledge of how google's update cycle or spidering or algorithm works, i would have found a rich internet revenue stream indeed

→ Posted by: martin at April 14, 2003 1:10 AM

I see today that the no 1 result is this : http://www.schoolblogs.com/dawn/

Although I think its a good blog, I can't believe it's really getting more links than Orlowski's article or a Metafilter discussion. So I wonder if Google is now using some notion of *recency* in it's PageRank algorithm for blogs. Is Dawn getting these hits because she posted more recently?

Does Google forget high ranking sites where the subject changes?

→ Posted by: phil jones at April 14, 2003 6:37 PM

I see today that the no 1 result is this : http://www.schoolblogs.com/dawn/

Does Google forget high ranking sites where the subject changes?

→ Posted by: phil jones at April 14, 2003 6:38 PM

Orlowski assumes that his article should have the highest relevance to the search term because he coined the phrase. But how the heck is Google supposed to know that? Does Orlowski expect PageRank to keep tabs on the chronological order in which search terms appear on different pages?

→ Posted by: Ben at April 14, 2003 11:20 PM

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