Ah, kids these days. Columnist, author and former economic advisor to the government of Macedonia, Sam Vaknin, claims in a recenty Global Politician piece that net-savvy teens have hijacked the Internet. (Hat tip: BeyondPR.) But in reality, it’s not the teenagers, but social media, that has taken over the Internet.
Vaknin lays out a good conspiracy theory that points to Google as the main culprit rather than networked kids. (Even so, his headline seems to place the blame on teens.) Vaknin points to a study that reveals “the existence of a pernicious feedback loop between Google, Wikipedia, MySpace, and Blogspot” that affects site popularity in Google.
This is Google’s policy now: Wikipedia articles regardless of their length or quality or even mere existence are placed by Google’s algorithm high up in the search results. Google even makes a Wikipedia search engine available to Webmasters for their Websites. The relationship between Google and Wikipedia is clearly intimate and mutually-reinforcing.
Google’s new algorithm, codenamed Big Daddy, still calculates the popularity of Websites by counting incoming links. … The more numerous such links – the higher the placement in Google’s search results pages. To avoid spamming and link farms, Google now rates the quality of “good and bad Internet neighborhoods”. Not all incoming links are treated equally. Some Internet properties are shunned. Links from such “bad” Websites actually contribute negatively to the overall score.
The top results in all 154 keywords I have been diligently monitoring since 1999 have changed dramatically since April 2006. The only common thread in all these upheavals is one: the more incoming links from MySpace a Website has – the higher it is placed in the search results.
From there, Vaknin starts to lay the blame on kids these days. “An unsettling pattern emerges,” he writes, pointing out that Wikipedia editors “are mostly unqualified teenagers and young adults” yet gets “touted by Google as an authoritative source of information.”
“In search results,” he adds, Wikipedia entries are “placed well ahead of sources of veritable information such as universities, government institutions, the home pages of recognized experts, the online full-text content of peer-reviewed professional and scholarly publications, real encyclopedias (such as the Encarta), and so on.”
And then there’s MySpace, “whose 110 million users are predominantly prepubescent and adolescents.” This phalanx of kiddies “now dictates what Websites will occupy the first search results in Google’s search results,” writes Vaknin.
Finally, after yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, Vaknin points the finger at Google. “Google has vested, though unofficial and unannounced and, therefore, undisclosed interests in both Wikipedia and MySpace,” he writes.
Funny, but I know several adults who have MySpace accounts and who are Wikipedia editors. I fit in both categories. Plus, the kids down own MySpace; an octogenarian named Rupert Murdoch does.
Vaknin’s issues have more to do with the democratization of social media and the fact that teens are more adept at adapting than the rest of us. He makes an interesting case, but he ought to leave the kids out of it.
Andy writes! 