Gatekeepers and you: the exciting third post

Seth Finkelstein and an unknown vendor of Algerian scarves responded to my last post with a few counter-arguments. Seth claims that my comparison of the Boston Globe's letters section in 1995 to blogs today "exemplifies a tendency to talk-down all the avenues that do exist, but we know are ineffective in practice (going around to various other publications), and talk-up an avenue that’s favored, but also seems ineffective overall (random related Google searches)."

I agree that I was talking down the 1995 alternatives to the Globe, like the Herald and the Phoenix. However, I was doing that because I thought that using them would be, as Seth says, "ineffective in practice." I have actually tried doing things like that (sending letters to the Phoenix about the Globe's poor reporting), and it was definitely ineffective. The other possibility is that I'm a ranting madman who deserves his place on the tip of the long tail, but if so, I submit that all of my arguments are always right because, hey, I'm a ranting madman.

Also, Seth is right that I was talking up Google, but I don't think that Google is "ineffective overall." I'm not arguing that Google is perfect. I'd like to say, "Here, look at how short this list of 'things I can't find on Google' is," but I don't know how to generate that list. All I can say is that I regularly find my searching needs satisfied by Google. I would definitely be interested in hearing of counter-examples, though. (I'm not talking about net censorship here-- a crippled Google is obviously less effective. What I mean is something like, "Here's this brilliant analysis of X that Google could index, but due to reason Y, you can't find it.")

Seth goes on to say "That Doc Searls is a gatekeeper is shown unarguably by the fact that so many people talked about and linked to my post after he was kind enough to put it through his blog-gate." I would say that it is shown arguably, rather than unarguably, and here is my argument. The letters editor for the Boston Globe is a gatekeeper-- we all agree about that. He or she decides which letters get published, in the same way that an actual gatekeeper decides which Algerian scarf vendors get let through the gate to the castle and which are prodded with spears until they retreat.

Doc Searls, on the other hand, flies from conference to conference and writes about things that interest him. Google indexes his pages, and as a result of the link structure of the web and Google's PageRank algorithm, pages that he links to end up higher in the Google search results. Doc Searls isn't actively deciding who gets on the first page of Google. If Google changed their algorithm to use BrinRank, in which pages are sorted by length and links are ignored, then Doc Searls would do exactly the same thing, and entirely different pages would get the top results on Google. If Searls is the gatekeeper, rather than *Rank, what's going on?

The second commenter, Monsieur Lheureux, characterizes Doc Searls as having the ability to drown me out in the Google listings, making my post "effectively inaccessible." Unfortunately, this brings me back to the Boston Globe letter and 1995 again. When the Globe decides not to publish my letter, it is inaccessible. Nobody can ever get it, not even me. That's different from being the 7 billionth result on Google. My blog post is still accessible from the internet, and I can tell everyone I communicate with how to get there.

I think the real complaint here should be about Google's algorithm. To some extent, it is unreasonable to complain about a search engine's algorithm. It's like complaining about bad commercials on TV. Their intent is to make money, and they've figured out a good way to do it. I'm not saying that making money is an excuse for immorality, but I don't think Google has a moral responsibility to popularize Z-listers such as myself.

One last note: anyone have any good suggestions for how PageRank could be improved? Simply ignoring links doesn't work so well (Remember Yahoo in 1997? It sucked.). Anyone?