Edward, I’m not trying to be dense, but.. I don’t quite get what you’re saying.. you’re saying that I can’t blame Google for how they construct the organic results to their search engine.. because that’s where all the ad revenue is? Do you mean that Google purposely constructs a certain type of both result content and result interface, in order to drive more traffic to their paid listings?

I just want to make clear.. is this what you are saying?

I almost always find the most interestingness in Google queries when I don’t put in the obvious search – when I restrict a search to site:.gov , or when I toss in some extra words to narrow down the search space, or when I re-run queries that took people to my own blog and see what they saw that made them click on my site.

None of those techniques are ever going to generate Google any ad revenue worth measuring, and there are so many possible variants that it’s hard to do SEO to screw up the results for commercial gain.

Does Jarvis have inside information on this? How does he know so much about all the experimentation? Would he care to elaborate, or is all his knowledge behind an NDA firewall?

Because I’m sure that Google does experiment. Lots. But the field of information retrieval, experimentation tends to be guided primarily by one’s fitness function, by one’s measure of “goodness”. So the bigger question to me is, what is Google’s measure of goodness?

Because it doesn’t matter how many experiments you do, if you are still only trying to optimize a single kind of fitness function.

By listening to statements from Google’s senior management, I have formed my own picture, my own belief, in what their fitness function is. And it’s a very limited function. But my own view is clouded, again, by the black box.

So Jarvis, or Google, really needs to come out and explain what it is that they’re trying to optimize. Certainly they can be transparent about that, can’t they? They can give away the fitness function, without giving away any information about how they’re actually solving/meeting that function, can’t they?

Or if they can’t even discuss what it is they’re trying to optimize, then that’s strike 2 for the “idea of Google”. Because a transparent company should at least be able to explain what service they’re trying to provide, i.e. what it is that they’re trying to help their customers do better. Right?

Unfortunately, I don’t even agree that Google successfully executes on “The Idea of Google”. I think they’re very good at scratching the surface of “the world’s information”. But they completely fail to execute on any deeper involvement or exploration or contextualization of information. As we’ve often discussed.

But to me, the deeper information is what makes “transparent” information ultimately useful and world-changing. Helping people discover the location of the nearest Starbucks or what time a movie starts, what the URL some someone’s homepage is, or getting a copy of a research paper is nice. But at the end of the day it doesn’t really change anything.

What changes things, where transparency really becomes valuable, is when you can find hitherto unseen connections in disparate pieces of information, or when you can find revealing details that no one else in the crowd seems to be aware of. But this is the very sort of thing that Google *does not* help you with. Rather, it “pageranks” you into popular, common information and sources.

So even if we look past this disconnect between Google and the idea of Google, I don’t think Google has really made the world all that more transparent. We can find movie times easier. But that is not real transparency.