The Googlization of Everything

Rough Type:

All hail the information triumvirate!
January 22, 2009

I was reading an interview today with Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica, in which he describes some of the Web 2.0-y tools that the company is preparing to roll out to enable readers to contribute to the encyclopedia's content. (I'm on Britannica's board of editorial advisors.) The interview touches, as you'd expect, on the great success that Wikipedia has achieved on the Web and, in particular, on its ever increasing dominance of Google search results. Cauz calls the tie between Wikipedia and Google "the most symbiotic relationship happening out there" - and I think he's right.

Cauz's remark reminded me that it's been some time since I updated my informal survey of Wikipedia's ranking on Google. A couple of years ago, I plucked from my brain, in as random a fashion as I could manage, ten topics from a range of knowledge domains: World War II, Israel, George Washington, Genome, Agriculture, Herman Melville, Internet, Magna Carta, Evolution, Epilepsy. I then googled each one to see where Wikipedia's article on the topic would rank.

I first did the searches on August 10, 2006. The results showed that Wikipedia did indeed hold a strong position for each of the ten subjects:

World War II: #1
Israel: #1
George Washington: #4
Genome: #9
Agriculture: #6
Herman Melville: #3
Internet: #5
Magna Carta: #2
Evolution: #3
Epilepsy: #6

I next did the searches on December 14, 2007, and found that Wikipedia's dominance of Google searches had, over the course of just a year and a half, grown dramatically:

World War II: #1
Israel: #1
George Washington: #2
Genome: #1
Agriculture: #1
Herman Melville: #1
Internet: #1
Magna Carta: #1
Evolution: #1
Epilepsy: #3

Today, another year having passed, I did the searches again. And guess what:

World War II: #1
Israel: #1
George Washington: #1
Genome: #1
Agriculture: #1
Herman Melville: #1
Internet: #1
Magna Carta: #1
Evolution: #1
Epilepsy: #1

Yes, it's a clean sweep for Wikipedia.

The first thing to be said is: Congratulations, Wikipedians. You rule. Seriously, it's a remarkable achievement. Who would have thought that a rag-tag band of anonymous volunteers could achieve what amounts to hegemony over the results of the most popular search engine, at least when it comes to searches for common topics.

The next thing to be said is: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?