Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 1:59AM Competition (between giants) is a good thing I suppose
Google has (lightly) funded a competition for the creation of Wikipedia pages in Kiswahili by university students in Tanzania and Kenya. (First place for most entries gets a laptop.) Why this sudden interest and largesse? Because Google's in a race against Bing for most eyeballs, and there are a few million Internet users in Sub-Saharan Africa who might -- if they aren't multilingual university students, for example -- look for information in Kiswahili. This is out of about 100 million Kiswahili speakers.
“Our algorithms are primed and ready to give you the answer you are looking for, but the pipeline of information just isn’t there,” said Gabriel Stricker, Google’s spokesman on search issues. “The challenge for searches in many languages for us no longer is search quality. Our ability to get the right answer is hindered by the lack of quality and lack of quantity of material on the Internet.”
The "right answer," just to be clear, might be accurate and true, but it must be in a language that's appropriate for the searcher. Students quoted in the article have posted the same information to both the English and the Kiswahili Wikipediae, but at least one English version has been earmarked for removal if citations aren't added.
But the question unanswered by the Times reporter, Noam Cohen, is how creating a specific page on the World Wide Web confers advantage on Google and not on Bing. Aren't they both crawling the same Internet? Is Bing less poly-lingual? I dunno.
Reader Comments (2)
Google is the behemoth in search engine. Bing has just started but I think Microsoft will make its way on top. I hope Google can maintain their position since Microsoft is undoubtedly monopolizing the market. But whatever happens, students will benefit from this competition. I guess, we should focus more on English.
Recently in Spain held a demonstration called Operation Teddy in which states that downloading music from the Internet is not a crime.The protesters gathered at the headquarters of the General Society of Authors and Editors of Spain (SGAE), using megaphones, laptops and posters announcing that in that space was downloading music from the Internet as part of the protest.The main purpose of this demonstration is to show that sharing files over the network means to promote freedom and technical knowledge, and should not be subject to copyright laws. The name "Operation Teddy" was because the group of protesters downloaded a song by Teddy Bautista, called Get On Your CNES.According to Xavier, a member of a group of hackers Metabolik laboratory belonging to the states "We claim the free flow of culture and technique against the digital divide that produce the lords of the copyright. A sustained breach of the outdated cultural industry and copy laws. "Is it validates the idea that downloading music and files from the Internet, is only one way to encourage technological culture?