Printed Matters

I was about to go off on Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur, when I realized that most of his arguments had already been well picked apart by others, especially by David Weinberger. So instead, I’ll just pick on one point that I didn’t see picked on elsewhere.

At least twice in the book, Keen makes a rather critical mistake about the nature of how Google works. On page 6, he writes:

…the more people click on a link that results from a search, the more likely that link will come up in subsequent searches.

And on page 93:

Search engines like Google, which run on algorithms that rank results according to the number of previous searches, answer our search queries not with what is most true or most reliable, but with what is most popular.

These statements, which say pretty much the same thing, are both false. The notion that Google ranks its results by click popularity is a myth, perpetrated either by a confusion over how the engine actually works (based on numbers of incoming links) or by the past existence of certain search engines that did work that way (e.g. DirectHit).

I almost threw the book in the garbage after seeing that error in the first few pages of the book, which indicated the author knew nothing of what he wrote. But I trudged on, thinking his argument might not have suffered critical damage.

It did.

Keen thinks the user-driven nature of the web is swamping our culture – art, thought, news, you name it – with crap, and that even if any gems were hidden in the crap, we’ll never be able to find them because there are no good tools for finding them.

He thinks the same “monkeys” who produce all that drivel also control how search engines work, so only crap and drivel and other things monkeys like can be found.

No wonder he thinks that, given his fundamental misunderstanding about how search engines work.

Sure, yes, Google can be gamed. Nothing’s perfect. But Google can also respond. Our tools for searching for things are still evolving, still catching up to the onslaught of new information – much of it, I concede, pure drivel and crap – that the web has unleashed.

And, importantly, it’s not the monkeys doing the gaming by wildly clicking stuff in some Pavlovian frenzy. The people gaming Google have a fairly sophisticated understanding of how search engines actually work. These are the same kinds of people who could game other systems – like banks and stock markets and people – long before the web.

Keen admits that the web is a reflection of us. Since the web is people, producing things and linking to things, the very idea that the web is nothing but crap and drivel with nary a gem to be found amounts to a profound and imponderable cynicism.

Lucky for us, then, that his arguments are based on false premises.

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