Information Research Weblog

A busy day, today. My attention has just been drawn to another Google iniative - Google Base. As usual, it is in a beta phase at the moment, but the question is, what exactly is it intended to be? The stated principle is that you can deposit material in the base and Google will host it

Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content that we'll host and make searchable online. You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they search Google Base. In fact, based on the relevance of your items, they may also be included in the main Google search index and other Google products like Froogle, Google Base and Google Local.

However, when one carries out a search on Google Base, it is difficult to determine what is hosted by Google and what is normal Web content. For example, I bought a nice fresh sea bass this morning and so went looking for a recipe and up popped a site for one Michael Thompson with, at the head, a recipe for 'Barbecued Squid with Hot Dipping Sauce (Squid Sate)' - sea bass was an alternative to the squid. When I searched on the Web, instead, the same site appeared - although lower down the listing. So, is this a Google-Base-hosted site or does Thompson have his own site?

A further interesting question relates to originality in the recipe field - I put the full recipe name into Google and came up with 370 identically named recipes - down to the parenthetically embraced 'Squid Sate'. Could someone claim to have been plagiarised? :-)

Another search brought up a quotation site - again, not evidently hosted by Google - which had a quotation from J.K. Galbraith that I rather enjoyed:

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong. - Galbraith, John Kenneth

Given Cheney's characterisation of Democratic politicians who have been speaking out against the war in Iraq as peddling 'cynical and pernicious falsehoods', that bit about the mendacity evident in the higher levels of public administration is highly relevant. There's an old saying about the pot calling the kettle black that springs to mind.