Under Development

Posted on 7 May 2009 at 11:12

 

Gallery

David Robinson does his bit for charity, but his benevolence is sorely tested when he takes up the cause of a colleague who can't stop Googling himself.

I've been on holiday this month, diving in the Red Sea with Mrs R, so I've had very little contact with custards. This means they've given me precious little to write about, which means that I've got a bad case of writer's block, and this column's a week overdue already. Argh! What to do?

The easy option would be to have yet another pop at Microsoft. Surely there's enough material there to keep me going until the next millennium. But you could entitle a column like that Coward's Way, as it's hardly bristling with originality, so we'll leave Bill & Co in peace for this month at least.

So what about your friend and mine, good old Google, which seems to have a finger in every pie? We'll leave aside the thorny questions about what data it logs when we make searches, and who it sells or gives that information to, even though there's probably a book's worth on that topic alone. Instead, we'll keep it simple and stay with the basics, which for Google is its core search engine. Despite all the maps and free applications, it's internet searches that we associate most with Google. Are they as good as they could be? Are they as good as we need them to be? I think not.

For instance, how often do you search for something and wonder why the best, most relevant results are buried on page three or deeper? How often, particularly when you're looking for something you want to buy, do you get tangled up in a series of price-comparison portals that lead you round and round until you're back where you started? Why are some links months out of date? How often do you click on a link to find there's nothing there?

Charity case

A specific example I encountered recently involved an acquaintance called Jake Quaker. This isn't his real name but it's similar enough (in terms of the characteristics of the Google search response) to serve as an illustration. Jake and I sit on the committee of a charitable organisation. Six months ago, Jake emailed me to say that a Google search of his name returned a result that pointed to the charity's website, which showed his home phone number. Notwithstanding that all the other committee members had their numbers displayed too, Jake didn't want his home number to be publicly available. So, acceding to his wishes, I removed it and copied the new pages to the site's web server.

A couple of months later, Jake sent me a slightly snotty email castigating me for not removing his number as requested. Somewhat taken aback, and hoping Alzheimer's disease hadn't got me just yet, I checked the site to be absolutely sure and found that my recollection was correct. So I replied, telling him that his entry on the site was as he'd requested and implying that Jake was a bit sad for constantly Googling himself.

Two months later I received another message from him complaining that I really hadn't changed the site, as Google still came up with his name, the site name and his home phone number. Now I should reiterate that Jake Quaker isn't his real name. If you Google that, you'll get references to a cheeky parrot that goes by that moniker. However, his name is equally unusual. It's distinctive enough to guarantee that, when you search for his name, results about him appear near the top of the first page. This is unlike the search results for 'David Robinson', which suggest him to be a philanthropist, a world-class runner and, according to one prominent entry, "scum".