Google Is To Pink Slime As Apples Are To Airplanes

from the they're-nothing-alike dept

Among the reasons I believe companies like Google are so hostile not only to copyright but to other regulations, is that their revenue and aspirations are anathema to distinguishing value (prime meat) from muck (MSM). To the contrary, their business models are literally based on grinding up all content into a homogenous slurry in order to turn billions of clicks into billions of dollars. To companies like Google, torrent sites, and many aggregators, everything goes into the big, digital grinder — a John Irving novel, some bits of junk journalism, a few stupid cat videos, Lawrence of Arabia, several thousand mail-order brides, a hard-news report from Central Africa, trafficked children, an episode of Downton Abbey, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, The White Album, years of scientific research, and of course several jiggling pounds of college chicks shaking their booties at webcams. It’s all just ones and zeroes, right? It’s digital pink slime.

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Copyright maximalist operation "The Copyright Alliance," purveyors of ridiculous copyright propaganda, has really topped itself with a recent blog post. It is trying to compare Google to "pink slime." You know pink slime -- the stuff that got all sorts of attention a few months ago as being a somewhat disgusting looking output of excess beef products all mashed up together and then reused in other foodstuffs. What does one have to do with the other? Well, according to the absolute geniuses at The Copyright Alliance:I've now read this paragraph a dozen times. And my only conclusion is the person who wrote it has never used Google or, perhaps, any search engine. Because it gets the story exactly, 100%, completely backwards. It's not reality. It's the opposite of reality. Up is down, black is white, day is night kind of backwards.The whole point ofsearch engine is to distinguish the value from the muck. TheGoogle became such a huge phenomenon when it first came out (long after people had declared the search engine wars "dead") was that Google did a much better job. How does it do that? By properly findingand surfacing it at the top while. A search engine that doesn't distinguish the value from the muck is no search engine at all. It's a random website generator.Search engines careabout finding the best value. Hell, just a week or so ago, Google explained how it had made 39 changes to its search in May alone, with the goal of helping people better find value out of muck. There may be all sorts of reasons to dislike or distrust Google. The company is very big, and has lots of info on you, which raises plenty of privacy concerns. But to claim that it wants to homogenize all content and that it's against their best interest to distinguish value from muck makes zero sense. If it were true, we'd immediately see tons of other search engines and do the exact opposite: provide more value and take over the market (just like Google did a decade ago).I'm all for discussions about copyright issues, but can we at least keep them in the realm of reality, rather than fantasyland?

Filed Under: aggregation, media, pink slime, search engine

Companies: copyright alliance, google