Tag Archives: politics of search engines

Book Review: The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan

I’m a so-called Google poweruser. Not only do I use the world’s biggest search engine for my daily queries like millions of ‘normal’ mortals do, I also use Google for my pictures (Picasa), my agenda (Google Agenda), video’s (YouTube), documents (Google Docs) and, most importantly: my e-mail (Gmail). So when a book comes along entitled: The Googlization of Everything (And

The Search Engine That Talks Back to You

With the mission of defining ‘the future of information consumption’, the founders of Qwiki, a self-proclaimed multimedia alternative to the text-based search provided by Google state to have launched the ‘next big thing’: a narrative search-tool based on the computer ‘telling you a story’ accompanied by videos and pictures about the term you are looking for. “Whether you’re planning a vacation on the web, evaluating restaurants on your phone, or helping with homework in front of the family Google TV, Qwiki is working to deliver information in a format that’s quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search.”

Bow down for your Google overlord

The Church of Google worships their God as a female Goddess. She is all knowing, omnipresent, potentially immortal and infinite. The Church of Google has touched me, therefore I shall spread the word.

Report on the Forum on Quaero

As part of Open-Search, I was invited to participate in the Forum on Quaero at the Jan van Eyck Acadamie in Maastricht, September 29 and 30, 2007. The purpose of the forum was to question and investigate the European intentions to build a search engine and, broader, to investigate the cultural, political, and philosophical issues related to information…