i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Foolishness reigns in the Old World.

When reading this article I had a hard time with the author's assumption that search-engine users should be engaging in "deliberative debate" by default. Many searches are conducted with the simple goal of answering a question, or getting very general information on a topic. If I search for "flowers," I'm asking about a very, very big topic. We've previously learned that users rarely pass the first page of results. In the ten hits my search engine returns, should several of them be devoted to fringe controversies involving flowers? I think not.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/21/israel.syria.facebook/index.html

Perfect example of the name matching problem discussed in Lecture 7. Strangely, I'm not even able to pull up Golan Heights (Israel or Syria) on the US Facebook site.

The Guardian reports the story of the Obama administration's attempt to silently discharge one of the signature phrases of their predecessors from political discourse: 'The global war on terror'.