SearchWiki a Blight on Google's Record Heather Havenstein, Computerworld via PC World (Nov 24)
Google is taking a lot of heat for not having an opt-out option on the personalized SearchWiki.
Dave Weinberger, at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, identified one very troubling aspect - that "results page shows users the nicknames of others users who have voted a page up."
Michael Zimmer, an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, commented that Google is having its users do the ranking and selecting.
""With SearchWiki, Google can now amass an even larger data set of user behavior, including how particular users rank certain results, what results they don't find relevant, and even what results should be there that Google's spider hasn't yet discovered," he noted. "In short, users are now performing much of the crawling, indexing, and ranking functions that Google has previously stated was done to near perfection through its algorithms. "
Posted by Gwen at November 26, 2008 03:38 PM