But in journals there is editorial oversight and a process of underlying journalism. And in some cases fact checkers.
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008The problem with that is that it’s not scalable. What you’re talking about is something like Mahalo and there’s certainly a market for that. In terms of something like Google and being able to find and categorize and present to the world in the form of search results, billions and billions of documents, you can’t do that with human editorial oversight. There’s a scalability issue and I don’t think it’s at odds with ethics. Google puts a lot of effort into making sure there’s a positive user experience represented by people finding information that’s meaningful to them and true.
There are some people subverting the system unfortunately. They make it challenging for organizations that feel in the real world, they’re the best answer for a query. But they’re probably doing a crappy job with their web site and Public Relations SEO and need to synch up their real world dominance in the category with how they represent themselves online from a technical, content and linking perspective. That is, if they want to play in Google’s playground.