Cory Doctorow: Search is too important to leave to one company – even Google | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Description

Search is the beginning and the end of the internet . Before search, there was the idea of an organised, hierarchical internet, set up along the lines of the Dewey Decimal system.

Again and again, net pioneers tried to build such systems, but they were always outcompeted by the messy hairball of the real world. As Wikipedia shows, building consensus about what goes where in a big org chart is hard, and the broader the subject area, the harder it gets.

Melvin Dewey didn't predict computers; he also mixed Islam in with Sufism, and gave table-knocking psychics their own category. A full-contact sport like the internet just doesn't lend itself to a priori categorisation.

Enter search. Who needs categories, if you can just pile up all the world's knowledge every which way and use software to find the right document at just the right time?

But this is not without risk: search engines accumulate near-complete indexes of our interests, our loves, our hopes and aspirations. Our relationship with them is as intimate as our relationships with our ...

Original URL

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/01/search-public-google-privacy-rights

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/01/search-public-google-privacy-rights