Should Google Tweak the News? asks the New York Times.
Count me Horrified. Can the Times retract, even, the question?
”Should Google play an editorial role in presenting readers with news?”
That question was a matter of debate at Zeitgeist, a Google conference this week in Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, said that Google had a responsibility to improve media.
The question came up when Ted Koppel, the longtime broadcast journalist, complained that too much news was drivel
Yay, Ted.
“I see this as our responsibility to some extent, trying to improve media,” Mr. Page said. “… we have a responsibility to … get people focused on what are the real issues, what should you be thinking about”
Larry Page! The guy who invented, along with his college pal Sergey, BackRub which became Google. And one used to feel so good about Google. The insanity seemed to begin—or if not begin, to be officially blessed —when Larry became CEO. Is this not a mistake? Is a however-brilliant engineer the same as a CEO? Qualified in the tinest?
Or has he come to think of himself as Having Anything To Say, and Google as this force here to shape us—the bloated ego never fails to amaze me. The past two years or so has seen Google search results so clogged with ads-as-pages, quasi-web pages, not even pretending to offer content … Although I despise perhaps more the pages that do. That put up “content” that says nothing, faux blog posts that make the teeth ache. As does any complete and total nonsense. Get the fuck out of my way, I’m looking for something.
Okay, often I’m looking for a certain item to buy, the sort of search that starts spammers a-droolin’. But what poor souls, what non-native English speakers, click on, hey, not only the links on those junk pages, but while we’re at it, on Google text ads at all? Raise your hands. Do you even see Google ads anymore, or are they just blots of busyness fucking up the page layout? (Do engineers give a rat’s ass about design? Can they?)
I don’t care who Google hires, in this new drive for … Importance? Hipness? Let’s be Social? … Google is stuck in ugly. This is not news, any more than is Larry’s fatuousness. What’s amazing is that people who should know better—well, that isn’t news either: everyone bows to money. Nowadays.
Not so long ago, there were forms of power that couldn’t be calculated in hits, page rank, dollars. It’s important to remember that it’s the tools that have gone rotten, the way people think. Money corrupts—and has, as long as we participate in that thinking, corrupted us.
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