Google Boogle. Anathema to Quality Journalism & Creative Writing: Dictatorship over the Internet Proletariat

I love Google. 2006. It is the subject of my 2nd essay published in the American Chronicle on 11 February 2006, "Google is Genius. Or, The Soul of MSN, Yahoo Trails & Language of Internet Searches"). I call Google "Genius" because it has found my word-weird search combination, the 6 words that follow, double quotes included in the search:

"fuzzy logic" "avian flu" murder fowl

when MSN can't and Yahoo can't either. Google has found my 1st essay uploaded just 2 hours before the search, "Fuzzy Logic & The Avian Flu. Or, Murder Most Fowl! A study in the language of science" (11 February 2006, American Chronicle).

I loved Google. After 2006. It was the subject of my internal dialogue when, months later, I noticed that nobody noticed me. I mean, I had always been writing faster and better than the average, I thought, where somebody would get 10 K hits in 1 day, I would get 10 hits. Hit? That´s a Miss. Loser! Like Hiccup in How To Train Your Dragon, some people lose their knives, but I am to lose an entire dragon! A blow to the ego. Counting years after that, now that I have 4 books on popular science published abroad, 4 big blows to 1 big ego.

Actually, it isn´t just my big ego. After all, Google is huger than my huge ego.

With Vadim Lavrusik, I have a comrade. He says (12 April 2011, mashable.com):

So what about search? Search engines like Google fueled an explosion of "so-so" content, but it has also fueled an explosion of quality content, said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land. The idea was that quality content would get linked to most.

"Quality content." I like that.

But when media organizations and writers began to better understand how the search algorithms ranked content, they started to create content "optimized" for search results by inter-linking content on their sites or monitoring search trends and filling the coverage with sub-par content to capitalize on search traffic, Sullivan said. And so we saw the explosion of content farms and a race for unique visitors to appease the advertising gods.

Did you notice? "Sub-par content" - Lavrusik is saying that because of the way Google ranks content, there has been an explosion of popular but low-quality content. Thinking that there are millions of bloggers, Google boggles the mind. Google is encouraging sub-par blogging? Boogle to Google!

Let me explain how Google works. I know now that Google ranks content by the Web popularity of the search. Quantity, not Quality. Occurrence, not Essence. Repetition, not Relevance. Today, the Google guys call it Google Trends. In other words, if you want your website to be visited by thousands or millions more, you should use "hot" search words in your posts. What does that mean? Here's an example: I just searched for "creative writing" and Google came up with 16 million results; I searched for "creative thinking" and Google came up with 3.5 million results. That´s a huge difference of 12.5 million. You want to be popular, right? Therefore, if I want 5 times more hits (and more of the greens), I should be writing 5 times more about thinking creatively than writing creatively! Or I should always be mentioning creative thinking when I'm writing about creative writing - and vice versa. That's what I'm calling the Google Boogle - it boggles my mind that Google should be dictating how I write and what I write about!

I love Urban Dictionary. This one defines boogle as "a negative result (of) having Googled a person; to be shocked or repulsed by what you find out about a person you have just Googled; to Google someone with the intention of finding out something negative about them." I´ll add another definition now: "to ogle Google continually and show & tell them what´s wrong and what´s to be done to improve the situation."

Down with Google Dictatorship over the Internet Proletariat!
Bloggers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

I loved Google, and now I've lost it. I have always thought there was nothing better than "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Now I know better: "'Tis better to have loved and learned, than never to have learned at all."