--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_re...@...> wrote: > > The newest thing from Google is "Google Instant" -- a kind of "psychic" > feature that instantly displays the results for what it *thinks* you are > searching for. You don't even have to press Enter; it displays results > as you type in your search criteria. I managed to get ahold of a Beta > copy and tried it out by typing "TM" and it seems to work. Full article > under the screenshot below. :-)
Before any TMer goes all apoplectic and gives themselves a stroke, my 'screenshot' (reproduced below) is an obvious fake, a paste-up job I created in less than a minute in Paint Shop Pro. I created it not only as a response to Buck's *incredibly* misguided offer to serve as censor for Fairfield Life, and as a comment on TM the way such a censor might skew results in Google if he had the position there that Buck is asking for on FFL, but as a larger commentary on search engines and their dangers. Google is one of the world's largest corporations. Given recent laws, it has the ability to pretend to be a person and contribute big bucks to elect the candidates it wants in office and the laws it wants passed. And yet no one ever seems to ask, "What happens if Google decides to skew the results shown in its search engine to match its beliefs?" It clearly has that ability. Even in the original article I posted it brags about filtering out "NSFW" searches in its new feature. Google has the ability to filter the results of any search exactly the way it wants them to appear, and order them in exactly the order it wants them to appear. Millions of people now trust Google as their primary source of infor- mation. But few of them ever ask whether they are seeing *real* information, or only the information that Google wants them to see, in the order they want them to see it. I personally know of no instances in which Google has *abused* its position as the world's largest dispenser of information; I'm just bringing up the issue to point out that it exists. What if Google's management and Board Of Directors one day went right wing, and decided to filter searches on "abortion" to eliminate all hits on websites that provide positive information on abortion? Or order them such that they only appear on the third or fourth page of results, where they will never be seen? What if some dweeb at Google decided that TM *was* a cult and, overcome with a fit of misguided zeal like Buck, decided to skew the results for anyone looking it up and getting the results I show below? What is to stop them from doing it? And how many users would even know it was being done to them, and that the information Google provided to them *was* skewed? We have already seen in America attempts to ban the *dictionary* from schools because kids were using it to look up words like "oral sex" and "lesbian" and "homosexuality." All I'm sayin'...just as a "heads up" commentary, is that the dictionary is Small Potatoes. Almost no one actually *uses* a paper dictionary any more. The Oxford English Dictionary is making noises about eliminating its print edition altogether because no one is buying them. Most people on the planet get their information from Google. And there is at present no oversight to insure that this information is not skewed for political reasons or for reasons having to do with corporate profits. There is at present nothing stopping *any* search engine from filtering the result of searches such that they look like my fake screenshot below. Just sayin'... [photo]
