mbauser2 - 3:05 am on Aug 30, 2002 (gmt 0)

The article makes him sound more like a cry-baby than someone taking a stand against a mighty foe.

Brandt is a crybaby. A big, huge, gigantic crybaby who just keeps moving his crying from forum to forum until he finds some sucker to believe him. I've already had to argue with "Google Watch" at SEF and alt.internet.search-engines. (I haven't even looked at Slashdot yet. He's probably there, too.) I'm getting tired of this, and him.

So his site doesn't rank well for all his keywords, and he's done "a lot of work" on his site. Boo-hoo. There are many sites that should be ranked high, that aren't.

Brandt's site shouldn't be ranked high. It's junk.

I want everyone to re-read the top of the second page of the Salon article [salon.com], where Brandt somehow convinces Salon that Namebase's page about Donald Rumsfeld belongs higher up in Google's results.

Now, go read Namebase's page about Donald Rumsfeld [namebase.org]. It doesn't say a damn thing about Donald Rumsfeld. It's a list of books and articles (not a comprehensive, or even systematic list, just the list of what Brandt has read), and list of other names that have appeared on the same page of an article as Rumsfeld's.

If you can convince me that the thousands of people who search Google for "Donald Rumsfeld" every year are thinking "I want to know how many times Rumsfeld's name has appeared on the same page as Gerald Ford's", I'll believe that Google's algorithm is flawed. Until then, I'm just going to assume that Brandt is a crackpot and a crybaby who's vastly overestimated the importance of his magazine-clipping hobby.

Google has not judged Brandt's site as a lacking; Brandt's peers (whom he considers "the petty bourgeoisie") have. PageRank is a quantification of peer review. You and me and every other webmaster in the world make choices about who we link to. Not a lot of us think that an incomplete indexing of obscure magazines is worth linking to. That's not Google's fault. That's the voice of the people. That's democracy in action.

I'll say this before, and I'll say it again. Brandt is not the friend of democracy. There's one search engine in the world that gives the people a major say in the results, and Brandt is throwing an extended tantrum over the people not liking him. He doesn't want democracy; he doesn't want the people to have a voice; he want's a more tyrannical system where a smaller group of people (his 'magic librarians) tell the rest of us what's important.

I object to that, and so should everybody else. It's a giant step backwards, and veiled argument for dictatorship. It would favor the few at the expense of the majority. Brandt's position on this isn't just technologically wrong, it's morally wrong, and I'm really disappointed that more people haven't seen through his rhetoric yet.