Information Research Weblog

I didn't get to the Saturday issue of the FT before this morning and there I found a leader item on search engines. I don't think I've seen a newspaper leader on the subject in the UK before. The item is 'Online searching: who's feeling lucky?' - available on the FT web site, but only to subscribers. The main point about the article is the suggestion that with the limited number of search engines available, or rather, the dominance of Google, there's a need for 'one fully transparent search engine, preferably maintained in the academic realm.' Isn't it curious how the advocates of capitalism always find a role for the public sphere when they want something unbiased? :-) The suggestion was made originally by Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in a research paper, but I haven't been able to locate it on the Web.

Good luck to the FT, but the chances of any university in the UK picking up the challenge to provide a 'fully transparent search engine' are pretty remote. You can count on the fingers of one hand and still have spare capacity the number of institutions pursuing serious information retrieval research and so deeply mired in managerialism are the institutions that the probability of selfless public service is remote. Everything these days must have an 'income stream', nothing is done for nothing, and the tentacles of central government's assessment procedures stretch everywhere.