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| Bede Constantanides | Bart asked me to read this and tell him whether it made any sense to someone of my age. (I am 13 years old).
Having finished reading it, I have a much better understanding of what Google is all about - It's not just another search engine, editing its results around its advertisers' needs, but an ethical user-centric organisation. After reading the preface's first couple of pages, I was genuinely interested and could see what the book was about, despite stock market terms that I did not understand. I was really interested by your thoughts on binary systems' inability to understand meaning. As I reached chapter one I noticed the 'mini-chapter' style of the book, which although I liked, I found made the book a little disjointed and a bit random in places; suddenly jumping from one subject to another. This idea did, however, make the book a fair bit easier to read. This is because I wasn't bombarded with pages of solid text which nobody likes. After reading chapter 3, I understood how Google needed to adapt to stay on top, in order to beat the likes of Microsoft in the search market. I found chapter 3 to be well written and interesting. By the time I had reached page 100, I was really wondering where the book was going as it didn't really seem to have a plot - are all books of this kind written in this way? I wouldn't know as I have never read a book of this kind before. I found page 121/122 interesting - PHP requests in URLs and cookies etc. - how should Google index these? I enjoyed reading chapter 8 and learning about digital and analogue. However, it was a mini history of digital and analogue computing and did not seem very relevant at the time. I found it interesting, but didn't understand why it was there. All in all, I really liked the book, I've learned loads from it - search is a tricky business! I have understood (nearly) why Google is so successful and how it must improve to remain the best. I found the chapters on context and Pigeon/Pagerank to be really interesting. Overall, I have definitely enjoyed reading your book, which is well written and makes a very good read - I would recommend it. It occasionally goes off the subject a bit, but what a boring place the world would be if we never got sidetracked! |
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| Reply | Thanks Bede. This is one of the best overall critiques I have had so far. You are right about the lack of a plot, which was tricky. Plots and stories need a beginning, middle and end, so it would have been much easier to write about Netscape, for example, up like a rocket - down like a stick. One of the most interesting thing about Google is that they are focussed on the long-term, but... Judith Milner, being 80 something and never having used a computer as such, read it twice to make sure that she had got it and then said: "This is really only the beginning isn't it?" Yeah, I reckon, their IPO was (in Churchill's phrase) the end of the beginning, as it was for Microsoft. I'm sorry that I did not explain the significance of analogue computers properly. The point was that this whole Hunting of the Boojum began with Alan Turing and Vannevar Bush. Turing's work led to the first binary computer, Bush was Mr Analogue. If binary has failed to handle semantics, 50 years later, could Bush be right and an analogue computer might succeed where digital has, so far, failed? It looked possible, but there seem to be inherent structural problems with analogue systems, such as storage, even before we get to the problem of binary logic. For someone, like me, who earns their living working with boolean logic, the alternative of a ternary or 'genetic' logic is frighteningly heretical. So it was with relief that I reread Gregory Bateson and found that he had proposed ternary logic as a bridge between Shannon's binary system and Malinowski's concepts of context and exchange, 50 years ago, in Towards an Ecology of Mind. Bateson was a dreadful writer, but a brilliant scientist who worked with both Von Neumann and the early social anthropologists. The other major relief was that Sony, whose work on Aibo is probably the most advanced research on virtual (artificial) intelligence, are also moving towards using the genetic model of communication and learning in robotics, not a double helix (which is sexual communication) but single-stranded mRNA. A couple of years' back I posited this as the potential origin of "Messenger Consciousness" but almost nobody, apart from Steve Grand, had any idea of what I was going on about. You are right about getting side-tracked. Writing a short history of cyberspace and how Google changed it forever, means never reaching the end of what may be relevant. When I did Social Anthropology at university, a friend complained that anything that was human was part of the subject, but like the Xanadu project, if everything is significant, then nothing is significant. |
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