Wednesday, June 20, 2012

[Wōdnes-dæg] Internet Superpower Google Alarmed by Growing Number of Removal Requests

Introduction
The Article Summed Up
A Brief Reminiscence, and how Things are Now
The Words of House Google
Search Engines: Naturally Democratic?
Closing

{Just like Nintendo with its Hanafuda cards, before they made it big Google had its postcards. Image from the Jo-Joe Politico blog.}



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Introduction

In the Globe and Mail of 20 June 2012, tucked into the right-hand side of page A3 was an article about Google. Specifically, about how Google has released its transparency report for the first half of 2012 and found an "alarming" trend.

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The Article Summed Up

According to the transparency report the number of requests from governments has increased by a quarter from last year (when Google began to notice censorship struggles). According to the 2012 report, 12,000 items were requested to be removed. These items ranged from videos to blog posts, most of which were political in nature.

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A Brief Reminiscence, and how Things are Now

This article indirectly presents an interesting state of affairs.

I can still remember when "Google" was a new thing, and how I was the one who turned a few of my friends onto it. Yet now the company has so much control over the internet. Such power might make some people nervous, but of all the internet-based properties search engines might make the most benign internet overlords.

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Search Engines: Naturally Democratic?

Search engines exist to help people find content. Content mills are in full swing despite many objections from writers, readers, and almost everyone else. People are always creating more and more blogs. Videos, photos, and music are all being constantly uploaded to said blogs, or to countless other websites.

It's in a search engine's best interest to help make sure that people can create a wide variety of content, and to help keep freedom of speech in tact as much as possible.

If content was completely curtailed and all political, or contentious, or controversial things were blocked from search engines they would lose a lot of their current influence. People would find ways to access content that didn't involve search engines, either going back to sharing content exclusively via direct links, or coming across some other means of spreading around what they had to say. And with these other ways of sharing and finding content, the heart of search engines' power, their search algorithms, would lose more and more importance.

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The Words of House Google

At the same time, it's hard to dispute Google's dominance among search engines (although it's quite a bit behind almost everyone else on the social network front - it seems Google+ is still a mystery to many).

Monopolies are never good, and there are alternatives (e.g.: Microsoft's Bing, GoodSearch, and Yahoo!), but a company with "Don't be evil," as its unofficial motto is bound to live by those words, right?

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Closing

Check back here on Friday for a hunt for the good in The Last Airbender.

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