Stephan Miller

Are We Creating Our Own 1984?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

“You can’t comment on that post. It’s two months old. It will look like spam.”

“Damn! A year old, can’t like that one. It is so last year.”

“Shoot! That software looks a lot better than the program I am currently using. Time to try it even though I have only used the other program for a week.”

Over the last weekend I downloaded some desktop meta-search software. I haven’t used software like this in a few years, ever since Google got a bit better at finding the sites I needed. What it does is grab the search results from multiple search engines at the same time and present them to you.

And what did I find using it? Hidden sites. Sites that Google never finds. Sites that still had value.

But guess what? I could do nothing with it other than read. And this made me think.

Did you ever use a blog search engine and try to find information? Did you find it?

Most blog search engines sort entries by date. Obviously because new is more valuable information for some reason. And I have noticed that more and more, standard search results seem to be following the same trend.

And if you really want to lose any sense of the past or history, follow a few people at Friendfeed. There is nothing old there.

Keeping up is a blur that in my head has a tendency to block the past. And now I ask the question that is the title of this post:

Are we creating our own 1984?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Can you ditch Google for a metasearch engine?
• Stay Away From Search Engine Spam
• Scour brings friend tracking and personalization to metasearch

• 

Category: Search Engines, Social Media | Tags: 1984, blog search, history, Metasearch engine |

8 Responses to “Are We Creating Our Own 1984?”

1. Sid Parham (1 comments.) says:

   December 23, 2008 at 6:11 am

   I always thought Brave New World more likely than 1984. It is Henry Ford who said “history is bunk.” Dates in Brave New Worlk are AF after Ford–while Huxley doesn’t imagine the electronic and information revolutions–sex, drugs, and biological engineering are all part of the society’s control mechcanisms.
2. Bruce > The BIG Desk (5 comments.) says:

   December 23, 2008 at 7:55 pm

   Just a side note on searching blogs. I came across Twingly today, nice site. It’s a blog search and blog rating site. The searches are good, ratings are like page Rank but strictly about blogs and they just released their top 100 blogs (great place to find sites to comment on and a great goal to have). I’m not affiliated - just liked the site.

   Bruce
3. Rob (4 comments.) says:

   December 24, 2008 at 12:39 pm

   I’m sure having results ordered by date has occasionally saved me. I am notorious for posting a comment on a blog or forum, and then later seeing it was a year old. No one talks about Michael Jackson wearing just one glove anymore.
4. Stephan Miller says:

   December 27, 2008 at 4:41 pm

   @Sid You might be right about that one. I was focusing on the the rewriting of history. There is nothing in a search engine’s algorithm that measures accuracy or truth.

   @Bruce I will check it out.

   @Rob Current events should be in chronological order. I think what I am trying to get at is the fact that, for the most part, the bastions of what is true and real on the internet fluctuate with their ranking.

   If the right person with the right skills could write a post tomorrow stating that Siberian Tigers are no longer facing extinction and their population has quadrupled in the last two years, it would be a lie. But how many people reading the post would believe without looking elsewhere.

   And if you follow enough people online, you realize a lot of them with “brilliant new ideas” are really rehashing old ones which may actually have more value. But the cult of popularity and newness would rank the newer idea higher.

   I am not bad talking any algorithm. just stating this:

   new != truth
   new != best
   new != most accurate

   And new does not void the past.
5. Speeding Links For Search For Blogging Readers - Week 52 - Problogger Make Money Online with Blogs says:

   December 28, 2008 at 2:38 am

   [...] Another great post from Stephan Miller: Are We Creating Our Own 1984? [...]
6. Paull Hamilton (1 comments.) says:

   January 3, 2009 at 7:03 am

   I like what you are saying about Google burying sites, which are probably quite informative solely because they date further back. Not everyone is looking for up to the minute topics, they may have a genuine request for information from way back. Quite frustrating!
   http://paullhamilton.com
7. Shirley (3 comments.) says:

   January 3, 2009 at 8:05 am

   Haha. Great post. Yes, I guess I’ve never really thought of this, but often it is useful to have the new information, whether or not the old articles/posts are still valid…

   Blogging has created this culture. After all, why would we show dates if dates weren’t important?

   And you are right, new does not make it valid, or accurate, or the best. But new makes it current. And sometimes ‘current’ is most important.
8. Stephan Miller says:

   January 4, 2009 at 10:04 am

   Still, I can see this taking a wrong turn. Look at what happened when Stephen Colbert had people edit a Wikipedia entry. I just see it as a way history could be edited for a generation who may get most of their information from the internet. Just because a meme is pumped up doesn’t mean it’s valid and if it has to do with actual happenings, reality can be edited at least for hyperactive internet users. We could call them cyber wives tales or cyber urban myths.

   Another thing you could look at is online April’s Fool’s pranks. What if these weren’t only used on April 1st. Who would know?

   Maybe this article should have been titled “Who Has The Keys to Your Reality?”