Google changed my life. Before I found Google.com, I would muck around with Alta Vista, HotBot, or Lycos, putting in search terms like “Heidelberg AND digital press” and groaning at the 87,171 returned results. I’d scroll through the first 10 or 20 hits, some of which were pertinent to my research but which quickly went astray, such as to the Internet Guide for Chinese Studies, which is somehow related to University of Heidelberg, which has little to do with the company that manufactures printing equipment.
But since I discovered Google, my online research has become much more effective. I don’t know how they do it, but somehow Google always returns several targeted and reputable hits, and until recently, I wasn’t inclined to question its methods, but rather to simply sigh and smile and get on with my work.
Until recently. That’s when I read that many portals and major search engines are not only allowing companies to pay for placement but also are being ambiguous about letting searchers know their results are, essentially, an advertisement. And then I read that Google and others are struggling to both offer and censor image search capabilities, facing the two-pronged desire to enhance their services’ capabilities but also not offend educational and family markets.
On the one hand, these news items catch my breath: The future of the Net is indeed Orwellian, I fear. But then I breathe deeply and remind myself that the only true conspiracy I believe in is this hoax of an energy crisis we’re facing in California. I tell myself, you know, these aren’t necessarily bad things. Here’s why.
Noodling Around the Net
I come to the Net grateful for the information it offers me but always wary of the source. That has been true from the get-go, and I’m sure it was the same for Europeans a few centuries ago, when printed materials began filtering into their world. The average person probably had as little concept of how a printing press worked then as today’s Web surfer understands packet transmissions and secure socket layers.
And yet, the Net and its portals and search engines are increasingly important to our world. A recent Neilsen study found that one of every three Americans — that’s 95 million people — visits search engines, portals, or community sites, making them some of the most highly trafficked Web sites out there: Nine of 10 Web users go to such a site between one and five times a month.
Meanwhile another recent study, this one by Alexa Research, found that users are befuddled by how to navigate the Web: An “alarming number” of surfers enter a specific URL into the Search box of their home-page portal, rather than typing it into the address field of the browser.
Add these two facts together, and you can see that the public needs a little help; and frankly, I’m willing to give search engines a chance to improve the quality of their results using whatever methods they can — because they need to do a better job, and fast.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Web is not a library, and search engines are not librarians who have the intelligence to discern whether you want information on the making of the movie "The Sound of Music," or a physiological study of how our brains discern the difference between sound and music in aural stimulation. I’ve said it before and it bears repeating here: The Web is a commercial entity, perhaps to the chagrin of old-time academics and Well members, and that’s just the way it is. Advertising is part of that picture, and there’s no use burying our heads in the sand and hoping that online advertising will go away.
So if cash-strapped portals and search engines find a source of advertising revenue from selling search results, that’s their prerogative. I really don’t mind seeing “Find Music at Amazon.com and SAVE…Pop, Country, Jazz, R&B, Classical and Much More” as long as it’s clearly marked as a sponsored link (as it is with Google), and I’d much prefer that irrelevant link than Jane Smith’s home page with speculative where-they-are-now info about the actors who played the von Trapp children.
Scorning Porn
As for censoring potentially or obviously pornographic results of image searches, I must first applaud Google and others for even attempting to implement this technology. Image search technology has been a challenge since before the dawn of the Web, with companies such as Kodak, Virage, and others trying for years to figure out a way to accurately and effectively search and catalog image archives. Being able to search on image content is a valuable asset for a portal or search site to offer, but searching on my name at Google’s image search site told me that this technology is still definitely in beta, mature content filter aside. Yes, the engine returned my creativepro.com mug shot and bio page, as well as a once-removed link to my book "Web Design Essentials" on Amazon.com, but it also returned 223 other, irrelevant hits, including the Primal Coffee House Performers ’98, whose players include Anita Stevens and Dennis Strashuk; the Pueblo Arts site (“The Best in Southwest Indian Pottery”); and the Contact Us page of the Manitoba Elections site (“Everything you ever wanted to know about Elections Manitoba and the electoral process.”).
At one time in my life I probably would have railed against censoring potentially (or even bona fide) pornography, but not here, not now. Being a parent, for one, has changed my perspective, but more importantly, I just want my searches to be productive; I don’t want x-rated (or even NC-17-rated) images getting in my way. The greater challenge is to know what to screen, rather than whether or not to screen. As one pundit noted in the ZDNet article on the subject, pictures of babies are an obvious problem: They often involve nudity but are rarely (thankfully) offensive.
Unfortunately, that same Alexa Research study I mentioned earlier found that “sex” is the most-searched term; various derivations of “porn” are number four on the list, and a few similarly unimaginative terms are in the Top 20; searchers who want sexual hits can simply turn off the mature content filter, just as they can turn off Google’s SafeSearch filter in Preferences, which blocks Web pages with sexually explicit content from being returned in text searches. Giving users the choice of what they want to screen, to me, is a fair middle road to take, a way to satisfy most of the people most of the time.
Up the Organization
The real job of search engines is to bring order to the chaos of the Web, which is completely and utterly a disorganized and unregulated amalgam of information, and I can appreciate the almost insurmountable challenge these portals face. Planting advertisements in our search results and letting us censor our search results — well, I can live with these as long as the search engines are up front about what they’re doing and don’t try to pass off their results as something they’re not. As long as you accept both the Net and search portals for what they are, and don’t expect more from them than they’re capable of offering, you won’t be disappointed.
Read more by Anita Dennis.
This article was last modified on January 8, 2023
This article was first published on July 5, 2001
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