I'm a fan of Google's PageRank system, and have worked for some time in trying to improve the rankings for content that I'm interested in. That said, I do have some concerns about some of the initiatives described by Stross, most notably the book digitization project. He describes the fact that Google, as an engineering company, "viewed book scanning as a practical matter of addressing engineering issues 'at scale.' It had not realized that the problems on the engineering side were the easy ones; those concerning intellectual property and the law, far more difficult" (12). Also, Google refused to share information about its digitization processes, even with its "partner" libraries.
It was one of these partner, the University of Michigan, that opened its entire collection of seven million volumes to Google. (Other participants, as Stross describes, limited access due to copyright concerns.) Again, I question what this public institution (and the citizens of Michigan) really get in return for the institution's support for the Google project. In my view, next to nothing. Stross points out the direct commercial benefit to Google that digitizing the U of M content provided, which fatally undercut the fair use assertion that Google is making (100).
Google Book Search has changed a lot, and I wasn't aware of a number of the advances until reading this recently-published book (one example, the inclusion of books in cases where no text has been indexed).
I didn't realize, until reading Planet Google, the extent of the threat that Facebook poses to Google. As summarized by Stross:
The more members that Facebook signed up, and the more time that they spent within its cozy but closed confines, out of reach of Google's spider, the slower the pool of searchable information for Google to find on the open web grew (30).
When you consider the fact, noted by OCLC, that a quarter of a million new Facebook accounts are created daily, the challenge to Google indexing becomes clearer. Anecdotally, I can say that I've added a large amount of content to my Facebook space that I would have added to my blogger space.
Note that Google harvests Facebook content where it can; useful info that is in front of the authentication screen.
Stross describes the strength of the Google algorithm and its limits. Working in automation, I appreciate the need for scalability; the company's refusal to manually massage the results produced by the Google search engine Algorithm enabled it to flatten its competition, like Yahoo!, which employs some human cataloging of web content. This approach reached its limits with news coverage; for example, Stross describes an incident in which a high school student published on the web a fake press release describing himself as Google's youngest employee; the "news" story was published in Google News. Stross notes that "Google News could be blamed for contributing indirectly" to the decline of the newspaper industry, by helping to lead users to reading their news online (78).
In summary, a highly-recommended read.
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