The Web, According to Google
Should Google be regulated? Interesting piece in BusinessWeek on the company, as many readers know, I am in favour of regulation of search engines. [Link via Tom Murphy]
REGULATION NEEDED? "It's the kind of question the Internet is putting to us again and again," says Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School -- "the Net feels awfully public, but in fact almost every element of it isn't public or government-run or even subsidized. When these private parties start making individualistic decisions about who's favored and who's not, it does create serious legal questions." Zittrain argues that some regulation of Web searching might prove necessary should Google kill all its competition and become the only viable search provider.
That the issue even comes up is astonishing for a business that didn't exist until five years ago. That's when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University computer-science grad students, got a good idea for a search engine based on an innovation called PageRank. The system works by analyzing the linking structure of the Internet as a way to rank pages. Essentially, a Web site's influence and ranking are determined by counting how many other sites link to it.
To uncover this hierarchy, Google scours the Net using autonomous software called "bots." They scan the Web continuously, screening out blatant attempts to game Google by loading up a site with extra links -- while also giving extra weight to pages that are linked to by very prominent sites, such as CNN.com. This approach isn't really new. In academia, researchers have long rated the importance of any single paper by how many times it's cited elsewhere.
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