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Google rose to prominence by capturing the labor of others (links created by users and site authors between sites) and accruing the value of that labor to itsel
by claudeganon 6y ago
Google rose to prominence by capturing the labor of others (links created by users and site authors between sites) and accruing the value of that labor to itself through automation. It effectively swallowed up the value of unpaid labor that existed at a scale with which Altavista could never compete.
- sokoloff 6y agoAltavista had access to the same web that Google had. Google created a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to its door.
- claudeganon 6y agoI agree entirely, but the premise was that more labor went into Altavista’s indexing than Google’s, which is inaccurate. Google was better at capturing the value of labor external to itself, which was far more labor than was ever used to build Altavista.
- nerfhammer 6y agohmm this may be a good point. is it really capturing value or is it creating value? people made links because they wanted to make links anyway. the value of links to a search engine doesn't exist without a search engine, and the existing value of links isn't diminished by that (except for the specific case of a manually curated link directory, e.g. the original yahoo).
- claudeganon 6y agoThe links were the prerequisite of Google/page rank, so Google only realizes that value once they had been created. They added value to that labor by making visible and accessible a dimension of this underlying network to others, but then channeled that mostly to themselves and ultimately disrupted, perhaps even destroyed (depending on your perspective), the signaling they observed. They were not alone in this, but it’s hard to compare their impact on the web to say, various forms of cataloging of works in library networks, and come away seeing them as impartially additive.
- darawk 6y agoThis misses the point of the example, though. The point is that not all labor has the same value. Albert Einstein's thoughts produced a lot more social utility than mine do, for instance.
- claudeganon 6y agoEven Einstein, despite his immense genius, wouldn’t fail to acknowledge the social utility and necessity of all the mathematicians and scholars whose work informed in his own. He certainly wouldn’t express the sentiment “they were doing all that math and physics before I came along anyway.” Quite ironically, he was also a strident socialist, so I doubt he’d disagree with the labor theory of value either. I used the example of the library cataloging because I think it’s an apt parallel. These systems, invented by librarians for organizing all of the world’s information, prior to the internet, have contributed immense social utility and enabled work that would be otherwise be unimaginable and impossible. But no librarian would claim that Melvil Dewey’s accomplishment was greater than that of all the works that have been catalogued. Page rank itself was derived from measures of academic citation impact scoring by Eugene Garfield, who I likewise imagine would’ve felt the same, despite being a successful entrepreneur on similar terms. The sort of hubris behind thinking that abstractions of a network are more valuable than the network and its labor itself perhaps explains why libraries remain an incredible resource and Google search gets worse and worse, year after year.
- darawk 6y agoI don't really understand your point. Obviously the whole network is important. Einstein's contributions would not have been possible without the society around him to produce food and shelter, the centuries of mathematics and physics research he built upon, etc.. Nobody is claiming that these people did something completely on their own, or did not draw upon immense wealth created and produced by others. The point is that each individual person's marginal contribution to the global utility function is not equal. Einstein built upon the work of others but the edifice he created is worth more than the one I have created. He increased the social utility function more than me, so we can say that his work is more valuable than mine. This is completely orthogonal to whether or not he had help.
- bawana 6y agoThe American way - get other people to do your work! I still remember my CS profs saying they best quality of a programmer is laziness!