Publish date: 2023-12-03

The networkerBusiness This article is more than 15 years oldThis article is more than 15 years oldJohn Naughton, the networker

Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. We saw two examples of this last week. The first came when a new search engine - Cuil () - was unveiled. The launch was an old-style PR operation. Some influential bloggers and mainstream reporters had been briefed in advance, and whispers were circulating in cyberspace that this would be Something Big. Cuil would be the 'Google Killer' everyone had been waiting for.

Evidence for this hypothesis was freely cited. The venture was the brainchild of 'former Google employees': nudge, nudge. At least one of them had been at Stanford, the university that nurtured the founders of both Yahoo and Google: wink, wink. It had indexed no fewer than 121 billion web pages, compared with Google's measly 40 billion: Wow! Cuil had already received $33m in venture funding! Cue trumpets.

So many people were taken in by this that when cuil.com finally opened for business the site was swamped. When one finally got to it, the first reaction was incredulity that anyone could have taken the hype seriously: in search after search Cuil delivered results that can only be described as weird. It delivers a ragbag of hits, arranged in a columnar format, and with no obvious rationale behind its rankings.

On reflection, you didn't need to use the engine to realise that it could never have been a 'Google Killer'; you just had to look at the amount of venture funding it had acquired. At first sight, $33m may seem like a lot - it's $8m more than Larry Page and Sergey Brin got from John Doerr when they co-founded Google in 1998. But that was then.

What's changed is that in 1998 all one needed was a better idea - and Google's PageRank algorithm (which initially ranked a web page according to the number and status of other pages linked to it) turned out to be a better idea than those underpinning other search engines of the time. But, having overtaken the competition at a stroke, Page and Brin realised that to prevent the same thing happening to them they had to raise the bar. So they set about building the Googleplex, the largest computing engine in history, which now has over 500,000 computers in huge server farms across the world.

The main rationale for building this monstrous facility is that it would enable Google to provide not just efficient search performance but also a raft of other services (email, chat, blogging, photo-hosting, document-sharing, etc). The secondary rationale was to raise the bar for competitors who would need not just a better algorithm, but the money to build a huge computational infrastructure and acquire the expertise to manage it. As far as Cuil is concerned, even if its founders have a better search methodology (unlikely on the evidence so far), $33m isn't going to get them more than a modest server farm. Day One suggests they don't even have that.

The second case of ignorance came from the Commons select committee on culture, media and sport, which has been pondering 'unsuitable' online content and is Very Perturbed. 'Anyone who regularly watches television or reads the press,' says the committee's report, 'is likely to have become aware of growing public concern in recent months at the internet's dark side, where hardcore pornography and videos of fights, bullying or alleged rape can be found, as can websites promoting extreme diets, self-harm, and even suicide.'

Hmm... 'recent months' makes one wonder how long the committee's members have been in hibernation. They have also discovered YouTube and Flickr and are, frankly, appalled by what they see (or what their research assistants saw, anyway). So they have proposals to fix the problem. First, YouTube, Flickr & Co must preview everything before it's posted on their sites. Second, there should be a direct line to the police so that offending material can instantly be brought to the attention of Inspector Knacker. And of course there should be a quango to oversee all this.

I've been checking Flickr.com for a few hours. Uploads have been between 1,400 and 4,500 images a minute. The committee's proposals are so daft one begins to doubt Bertrand Russell's argument that democracy has 'at least one merit, namely, that a member of parliament cannot be stupider than his constituents, for the more stupid he is, the more stupid they were to elect him'.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqlqLavsdKsZmtoYG18osHGaGdsZ5ekvKi4xA%3D%3D