Negative externalities of Google
Google is on the whole an enormous and wonderful public good.
However, it has at least one bad side effect: it's strongly encouraging spammers to try anything to get well-respected sites to link to their viagra web sites. Therefore: blog comment spam, referer spam, wiki spam, ...
Prior to Google, those links would only help criminals if people clicked on them, which requires a certain amount of thought to make them look relevant. Because googlebot is not quite so clever yet, even stupid links can get some marginal gain for spammers.
I can imagine an optimal algorithm might disregard those links. But until spammers really believed that the links weren't helping, we'd still see lots of web spam.
posted Fri 3 Sep 2004 in /business/google | link
What's he building in there?
(Cue Tom Waits)
More on vmunix.com
posted Thu 26 Aug 2004 in /business/google | link
That interview
Jason Kottke has the notorious Google/Playboy interview. I don't know if much of the content will be new to people who have been following Google, but the very fact that these questions are asked by Playboy demonstrates some kind of success.
Ultimately you want to have the entire world's knowledge
connected directly to your mind.
— Sergey Brin.
posted Sun 15 Aug 2004 in /business/google | link
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