Here is my paper! I hope you enjoy, first kick back and chill. Its been a long week. Enjoy some tunes and have a great fall break!
McClain
Cauthen
October
11th 2015
Internet
Studies
Google: Reflection on its Triumphs and
Failures.
In order to pinpoint a key moment in the
history of something you must understand it’s origin in order to understand
where it is headed. In this paper I will talk about Google and its history. I
will talk about the crash Google underwent a while back as well as the ripple
effect it has caused. There are pros and cons to everything. I will talk about
why Google in its early days was a brilliant addition to the Internet world.
To learn more about Google I scoured the
ASU library data-source until I decided to go straight to the horse’s mouth:
Google. Founders Larry Page and Sergey
Brin
I was curious as to how they organized this system. I know
they wanted to prioritize the most relevant or accurate page, but how do you
decide what page that is? For answers, I looked towards J.D Biersdorfer book Google: The Missing Manual, 2nd
Edition. Google has several ways to find out whether a page is a good match
for a search. “First, it looks at links. Links from one Web page to another
don’t appear spontaneously; people have to make them—in effect saying,
‘Look here and here and here.’ Because each link thus represents a
decision, Google infers that a link from one page to another is tantamount to
a vote for
the second page” (Biersdorfer). Google also uses pages’ popularity to rank the
relevance of the page in search results. “Google uses this information to
assign Web pages an appropriate PageRank—Google’s term for status—which it
calculates on a scale from one to ten” (Biersdorfer).
As we all know the rest is history. Google eventually takes
off and outpaces all other search engines by creating an effective and
well-organized system of sifting through rated content for the “best” page
results on the web.
I believe Google is the most important thing to happen to the
Internet for two reasons. The first looks to when Tim Berners Lee created the
World Wide Web, where people could send information to each other through the
Internet creating infinite ways to share information and communicate. It was tremendous, it was wonderful, but it
was disorganized. Information upon information began to pop up as people
learned how to create web domains and different pages. I see it as a giant pile
of hay. There was so much and it was (and is) constantly getting bigger and
bigger. Then there are needles--as the hay piles up the needles get harder and
harder to find. That is where companies like Google come into play. Google
wanted to save people the time of finding those needles in the haystack.
Google is also important because at its height it proved that
all things are fallible. It’s easy to become accustomed to the instantaneous
and 99.99% accuracy of a search result from Google. Google has become a verb.
That is truly incredible. One must beg the question: what are the effects when a supposedly
infallible technology crashes? A couple of days ago that very thing happened.
Google has several applications that it created to aid it users. On October 9th
of this year Google Drive, a cloud based file sharing, editing, and saving
system crashed for two hours. Two hours does not seem like a long time, but the
Internet was in an uproar over the event. Google Drive is used every day by
millions of people to work on group initiatives, or simply just to save files.
The Atlantic Journal Constitution (AJC) wrote an article
covering the events. People expressed their outrage through various memes and
tweets begging Google to get its act together. “Apparently there were a lot of
people fervently working to meet a Friday afternoon deadline, and found
themselves locked out of their precious Google documents, which includes word
processing, spreadsheet and presentation tools… Many
people reported regaining functionality within about two hours, but losing that
crucial part of Friday afternoon left many office staff in a state of
panic”(AJC).
The crash goes to show that a
company as giant as Google is being pulled in so many directions and has
traveled far from simply being a reliable search engine. Google now is a
multi-faceted web titan. In life everything has a breaking point. Everything in
life is fallible, but sadly many individuals’ perfect image of Google was lost
after one of its crucial applications crashed.
This information, this view of a thing that changed the Internet
forever leads one back to the prophetic literature of some of the authors
studied in class. The words of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Lawrence Lessig. Has
Google become too bloated? When you look at its original idea it was simple and
effective, but when it was expanded and changed it became flawed. That simple,
Internet-changing idea became bloated and overused.
Nathaniel Hawthorne is a bit of a Luddite.
He is a man that somewhat fears change and technological advancement. In his
chapter Fire Worship he rails on the
invention of a new iron stove replacing the outdated fireplace. He talks about
how the fire itself died with the changes taking place. Look at Google--it has
become this company that people see as infallible leaving behind its humble and
predictable beginnings. This can be seen in the following quote. “He drives the
steamboat and drags the rail-car. And it was he--this creature of terrible
might, and so many-sided utility, and all-comprehensive destructiveness--that
used to be the cheerful, homely friend of our wintry days, and whom we have
made the prisoner of this iron cage!” (Hawthorne). Hawthorne sees all things
new having a downside. Google is an incredible addition to
One can also look to Common Wires by Lessig to get another
perspective on the Internet and how technology itself can be fallible because it is a commons.
Lessig talks about the Internet being a network of networks, linked to machines,
linked to people. He talks about how the Internet is the commons. We learned in class that the commons are shared thing. The
Internet in essence is a shared thing, which can be negative or positive. Is it negative that
Google is huge and, in many ways, owns a giant area of the Internet? In the
article Lessig talks about how the commons is place for innovators. One could
say that this infinite space is what causes companies like Google to have large
amounts of room to grow, but also to slip up. “In chapter 2, I introduced the
idea of a commons. We can now see how the end-to-end principle renders the
Internet an innovation commons, where innovators can develop and deploy new
applications or content with- out the permission of anyone else. Because of
e2e, no one need register an application with “the Internet” before it will
run; no permission to use the bandwidth is required. Instead, e2e means the
network is designed to assure that the network cannot decide which innovations
will run. The system is built constituted to remain open to whatever innovation
comes along”(Lessig).
It is easy to be bogged down by
trying to understand why something crashed or what the future will hold. When
you get down to it you must look at what has happened in the past to interpret
the present to better understand where the future is heading. Google came onto
the scene and changed the Internet forever. It put valuable information at the
forefront and praised the idea of progress. This can be seen in Google’s humble
beginnings and in the way that they use a ranking system to help get that
information to be more accessible. However, with all things especially
technology once must be careful. We must look to the past to also see what
others believe about technology such as Nathaniel Hawthorne. We must also look
at how the internet as a whole can be seen as a shared frontier of innovation
and how there is an inherent responsibility to share good and valuable
information.
Works Cited
Biersdorfer, J. D. "A Little
History." Google: The Missing Manual. Sebastopol, CA: Pogue, 2006. N. pag.
Print. 2nd Edition.
"Google Drive, Google Docs Crash,
Everyone on Deadline Freaks out." Google Drive, Google Docs Crash,
Everyone on Deadline Freaks out. Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC), 9 Oct.
2015. Web. 12 Oct. 2015.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Fire
Worship." Mosses from an Old Manse. London: Routledge, 1851. N. pag. Web.
Lessig, Lawrence. "Commons on the
Wires." The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.
New York: Random House, 2001. N. pag. Print.
"Our History in Depth – Company –
Google." Our History in Depth – Company – Google. Google, n.d. Web. 11
Oct. 2015.
Scott, Virginia A. "The Origin and
History of Google." Google. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008. N. pag. Print.
