Hey, where's my truth tester, voter dude?

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And Google will get sued again over rankings.

I'm sure it sounds cynical to say, Truth testing google searches is a horrible idea.

The divisions are very deep and go way beyond our borders. In one newsgroup I was in some europeans told us all to go see Fahrenheit 911 and some rather liberal Americans said "But it's Michael Moore."

I'm certainly sympathetic enough to this to suggest there are many issues which get coverage mainly from ideological POV's.

In the computer/business field; to hear coverage of the playstation 3 it is either an exciting new frontier in the public adaptation of L'unix which is being unfairly hit by the "Microsoft Lovers" or a very elaborate machine which is not a bargain and may be too expensive for the target audience.

I am very sympathetic to the latter view. Most of the gameplayers I know would rather be skateboarding, while most of the business coverage I've been reading favors not the Xbox but the Wii. That the simple design philosophy the Wii embodies is a continuation of that of the GameCube, which hasn't knocked either Xbox or Playstation out yet, doesn't change that Sony's choice of BluRay (sic) and Cell technologies works against the argument of Linux's affordability, or that the coverage of Sony's situation so closely resembles that of the Nintendo 64 before the GameCube was announced (which suggests there may well be similarities in the situations).

The problem with "truth testing" is that there are so many True Believers out here, that the Internet is currently optimized to bring True Believers together, and that most True Believers resent having the conclusions they draw from their facts questioned. In the case of the article in question, I am not willing to dispute any individual factual statement in it. Of course I disagree with the conclusion, but I have heard too many of these facts, including the FBI purchase of Mexican data, from other sources with other points of view (of course the source they cite, BayView.com insists on trying to lecture us on how to program in Perl) to dismiss this totally.

The obvious question is quis custodiet ipsos custodes? How can you prove you wouldn't be weeded out and what would happen if you were? Beyond that is the question of what is truth? With so many contradictory facts and so many diverse communities out there, focusing on a specific community often means editing. In your attempt to address that you are raising one more issue: how do you rank citations and how do you avoid complaints over the ranking of citations?

Google is getting sued already over a zero ranking. You want to open more lawsuits?

Posted by: jplatt39   Posted on: 07/13/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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