google

Sometimes the answer isn’t as interesting as the question. Consider this note from Yahoo Buzz:

On Sunday, the day before the nomination became official, [searches for] Alito sprang up a sudden 320%.

Did searches for Alito spike on tips White House staffers, or were White House Staffers vetting their nominee via the search engines?

Just when I was beginning to feel a little on my own with my talk about the Google Economy here, I see two related new books are coming out. The first is Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. The second is John Battelle’s The Search.

Findability appears to ask the big question that I’ve been pushing toward. From the description at Amazon:

Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond?

Here, as always when thinking about information, think about “marketplace” in broader terms than pure commercial, pure profit. This is the Google Economy.

37signals takes on Google and suggests some improvements.

Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this:

The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results might as well be hidden in a cave.

With all the talk about Google scanning or not scanning copyrighted books, I was happy to see Laura Quilter talking about Google as a library.

The Internet Archive is certainly a library. […] Libraries may be private, semi-private, public; for- or not-for-profit; paper or digital. Why is Google not a library?

More interestingly, she casts a critical eye on the Texaco decision that everybody points to as the guiding law on fair use. This, and the rest of her blog are good reading.

Danah Boyd posted about the biases of links over at Many2Many the other day. She looked for patterns in a random set of 500 blogs tracked by Technorati as well as the 100 top blogs tracked by Technorati. She found patterns in who keeps blogrolls and who is in them, as well as patterns about how bloggers link in context and who they link to.

The patterns Boyd points to would certainly effect the Google Economy, our way of creating and identifying value based on linking structures. And though she’s emphasizing gender differences, the patterns show broad differences in linking patterns between content types as well.

Discussion?

Google engineers have got the moon on their minds lately. We all got a laugh at their April Fools Day lunar hosting and research center job opening, but they’ve done themselves one better and several points more serious with Google Moon. Sure, it’s in celebration of the first lunar landing 36 years ago today, but if they’re so fixated on the moon, why not sponsor a space competition?

It would reasonably appear that here in the US, there’s only one map site: good ol’ Google. But until Google adds maps for countries other than the US, Canada, and UK, the rest of the world will have to look elsewhere. Enter the UK competitor: Multimap.com has been serving the world outside the bubble since 1996. From their self description:

Key features include street-level maps of the United Kingdom, Europe, and the US; road maps of the world; door-to-door travel directions; aerial photographs; and local information.

In short, it’s probably the best place to point any random set of coordinates. Example: my story about the Chernobyl tour should probably have included this street map of the region. (Yes, Google will now give me a low resolution satellite photo of the reactor, but photos and maps offer different value for different uses.)

My only complaint is that the service lacks the AJAX features that make Google Maps so great. But that might be changing. A post at The Map Room tells of a new feature for UK regions: a map overlay follows the mouse on aerial photos. Take a look at this example. Nice trick, eh?

Search Engine Watch did a story about how to use Google and Amazon’s tools to search full-text content inside books.

The gist? when you can get to the tools and where they’ve got content, it does a lot to make books as accessible and open as electronic content.

Sort of related: I’ve spoken of Google Print before and there’s more in the Libraries and Networked Information category.

From O’Grady’s PowerPage{#14723}:

I have no interest in true hacking (i.e. rummaging through people’s private junk) although viewing random unprotected IP cameras around the world in public places and controlling their panning and zoom functions is kind of mind-blowing. There are a ton of fun GHacks out there – like spelling out words in pictures using Google image search, and the Google poetry generator, or the news map generator etc. Check out more than a dozen Google Hacks here.

Sort of related: put an “&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky” at the end of your query URL to invoke Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” option. This is incredibly useful when using Google to search WorldCat, like this.

Roger over at Electric Forest is making some arguments about the value of open access to information. Hopefully he’ll forgive me for my edit of his comment (though readers check the original to make sure I preserved the original meaning):

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

I’ve been calling this the “Google Economy,” where the value of information is directly proportional to its accessibility. This is a foreign land to libraries, where isolation and division of information is the norm (just count the number of unrelated search boxes linked on your library site), but it’s something I see a few people working to overcome. Kudos to Roger and others for a lot of great work.