Joi's Low Profile

I like what Joi Ito wrote today about how to blog a subject without being a greedy Google pig about it. I guess if you put a certain "zinger" term in your headline, you'll get a much higher ranking. I didn't know this actually.

He wirites "I'm going to make a point to have cryptic titles for entries where I'm talking to my regulars and not to Google."

I guess we need to get used to the enormous egos around this joint and keep resisting the urge to use the power of this medium for promoting one instead of promoting a community of many.

When I worked at Lexis/Nexis from 1987 through 1992 with a hardworking team of MLS's (Masters of Library Science grads) honing the proprietary database of newswires, newspapers, magazines, and financial data, the search engine was designed to bring up the most meaty, substantial and relevant hits. There are days that I miss it's simple ethos and straight forward Boolean logic that put the most informed sources ahead of the more subjective ones. {I can hear you all shifting in your chairs getting ready to jump up and disagree with me, but restrain yourselves a second.)

If we had seen back then the way Google would deliver "most linked" but often off-point results or even worse (horrors!) PAID-RESULTS, I don't think we would have believed our eyes.

Google seems enormously vulnerable in this respect. If there were an alternative database with some SENSE and WISDOM, where I could go and type in "Halley" and get references to the astronomer Edmund Halley FIRST, followed by information on the Halley Artic Observatory, SECOND and then followed way beyond by Halley's Comment -- even I would be happy to see the world set right in this way.

In my opinion, we have reached a level of of near fetishism in terms of search engine tomfoolery. Only insiders seem to be in on the joke. We find ourselves in one endless circle jerk of Boolean bukkake, with pointless results spewing in every direction which only a few find delicious, as they lap up their own juices.