Comments on: Drowning in Data

By: Liz Lawley

Liz Lawley — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 17:05:33 +0000

I think that Google is also showing the strains of scaling–in terms of spamming, and data overload. It’s still useful to me for general queries, for very specific searching…but it’s not particularly useful in getting a feel for zeitgeist, for knowing what my peers think is important or useful, for effective resource discovery.

(Oh…and thanks for the Eliot couplet; I’ve long wondered where those lines came from!)

By: nick

nick — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 15:36:24 +0000

Touche. As a computer scientist it’s too easy to focus on the neat algorithms and forget about the source of data. I think the neat thing about Google was that they took data that was created for an entirely different purpose, and found something emergent in it (at least back before people started to game google, people wrote links to populate their micro-world, with little thought of any big picture). Thanks for the correction, I’ll need to re-think my criticism of manual tagging.

But I still wonder: is manual tagging the way to go? There are the focused dataphiles who care enough to metamark everything they have, but what about the lazy masses?

By: Seb

Seb — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:57:00 +0000

I think Google actually uses human input a lot: most links out there are arguably created by humans.