Description: A blog on knowledge governance, politics and policy. Updated whenever there's something worth saying.
Over at CIGI . Is it a problem that search engine companies, whose only job is to return information that people can trust and use, have hitched their wagon to a technology that produces falsehoods?
Yes. Yes it is. If companies won’t take their internet-cataloguing responsibilities seriously, we need to reconsider whether we should leave search responsibilities to the private sector:
Exactly how reckless are these companies being? Think about it in terms of how a search tool usually functions. When a user inputs a search term, Google (or Bing) serves up a series of links deemed to be relevant to the user. Although its algorithm remains a black box, Google Search is based in part on the assumption that the number of links that refer to a specific webpage can serve as a proxy for its authoritativeness. …