The internet has undoubtedly changed and shaped the way the world functions, and with this tremendous achievement, its regulation and management should be an overarching priority. Google has risen to the forefront of internet regulation and is now one of, if not the largest and most recognized search engines that the internet has to offer. With such a great power, comes a great responsibility, and this cliché of a statement absolutely holds true to Google. The increasing FORCE of Google should not be overlooked; the sheer dominance of the company in its current state is troubling enough. Google’s continuously growing power and influence over the internet should be regarded as a major problem, especially when analyzing its past and looking to
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In the essay, The Google Dilemma, James Grimmelmann makes several points about the imbalance between subjectivity and objectivity in Google’s search results. Google uses a page ranking system to categorize the hundreds of thousands of results that are produced from a search term, and it uses the “ability to shape its search results to prefer some web sites over others” (Grimmelmann 944). However, this system is only slightly human operated, with majority of the calculation and ranking done by Google’s automated formula, and a faulty one at that. As explained in text from Fred Vallance-Jones and David McKie, “when using a keyword search engine such as Google,” the search selects “sites that are visited most frequently, including obscure and useless ones” (Jones and McKie 20). This robotic generation of results not only categorizes pages in an inefficient manner but also allows web page owners to alter their websites’ position in the page ranking system. By increasing the number of links from website to website, these sites attract more ‘frequent visitors’, propelling the web site quite high on the page ranking list. This is where Google becomes involved and then seeks out the culprit web sites with full intentions of repositioning or removing the site completely. The issue with this is that Google is removing a problem that stemmed from …show more content…
In The Google Dilemma, James Grimmelmann describes that the search for tiananmen on the American Google at one point yielded different image results from those on the Chinese Google. On the American version, the images displayed the violent democratic protests that occurred in Tiananmen Square, but on the Chinese version, all of the images were of the Tiananmen monument itself with no trace of the protests. It seems clear that the harsh censorship rules in China affected Google’s decision to remove certain results from the search term; it is interesting to note however—as an article from Fortune explains—that Google left China in 2010 after “disputes over censorship with the Chinese government” (Matthews). While censoring information from the public may be a significant practice in China, it is likely that other governments and organizations have followed in China’s footsteps and made censorship suggestions to Google as well. James Grimmelmann writes that, “Google has the power to make the truth accessible” (Grimmelmann 950) but when the company is being used as a vehicle to manipulate its users and alter certain information, “that crosses a line…[of] human rights, political freedom, and democracy” (949). If Google’s power was this immense in 2008 when Grimmelmann wrote the essay, the amount of control and power that the company
In the essay, The Google Dilemma, James Grimmelmann makes several points about the imbalance between subjectivity and objectivity in Google’s search results. Google uses a page ranking system to categorize the hundreds of thousands of results that are produced from a search term, and it uses the “ability to shape its search results to prefer some web sites over others” (Grimmelmann 944). However, this system is only slightly human operated, with majority of the calculation and ranking done by Google’s automated formula, and a faulty one at that. As explained in text from Fred Vallance-Jones and David McKie, “when using a keyword search engine such as Google,” the search selects “sites that are visited most frequently, including obscure and useless ones” (Jones and McKie 20). This robotic generation of results not only categorizes pages in an inefficient manner but also allows web page owners to alter their websites’ position in the page ranking system. By increasing the number of links from website to website, these sites attract more ‘frequent visitors’, propelling the web site quite high on the page ranking list. This is where Google becomes involved and then seeks out the culprit web sites with full intentions of repositioning or removing the site completely. The issue with this is that Google is removing a problem that stemmed from …show more content…
In The Google Dilemma, James Grimmelmann describes that the search for tiananmen on the American Google at one point yielded different image results from those on the Chinese Google. On the American version, the images displayed the violent democratic protests that occurred in Tiananmen Square, but on the Chinese version, all of the images were of the Tiananmen monument itself with no trace of the protests. It seems clear that the harsh censorship rules in China affected Google’s decision to remove certain results from the search term; it is interesting to note however—as an article from Fortune explains—that Google left China in 2010 after “disputes over censorship with the Chinese government” (Matthews). While censoring information from the public may be a significant practice in China, it is likely that other governments and organizations have followed in China’s footsteps and made censorship suggestions to Google as well. James Grimmelmann writes that, “Google has the power to make the truth accessible” (Grimmelmann 950) but when the company is being used as a vehicle to manipulate its users and alter certain information, “that crosses a line…[of] human rights, political freedom, and democracy” (949). If Google’s power was this immense in 2008 when Grimmelmann wrote the essay, the amount of control and power that the company