Is human intervention essential in every aspect of search technology, or for that matter is it possible? There are plenty of legitimate reasons for editing the search results manually. Out of billions of web pages resident on the World Wide Web, many contain malicious codes and viruses which could potentially harm users who accidentally happen to visit it via search engines. Some content are in gross violation of intellectual property rights and/or are illegal in nature. The list of websites that fit this category is limitless. It is the legal and moral responsibility of search engines to remove such content and thus safeguard the users against potential harm.
Amit Singhal, in his introduction to Google ranking (don't get all that excited as Google is not going to give away its trade secret) said “In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms.” The statement clearly reflects that policing the content available on the web is not the sole responsibility of search engines, it is a collective responsibility. He went on to further say that “The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.”
However Google is not adverse to manually altering the search results in cases were it is legally and morally obliged to do so. “I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc),” a statement that clearly reverberates Google's stand on this issue. Stay tuned to catch the latest from Google.
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2 comments:
The post reminds me of how search engines differ from humans. On the other hand, they perform a mammoth task which would otherwise be impossible
Lack of intelligence make search engine crawlers what they are and that human intelligence will have to be applied from time to time. If only machines could all the things all by themselves.
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