Thinking about Google

Given how regularly I use Google, and how rarely I think about its internal architecture, or the way in which it finds and ranks pages, I was more than a little perturbed by some of the essays posted at the Google Watch site. I’m having a hard enough time with Ashcroft’s barnstorming tour to cheerlead for the PATRIOT Act (which might, on second thought, be a way to distract people from the even worse elements of the proposed VICTORY Act), without now having to worry about the prime opportunity Google poses for data mining. Sigh. On the other hand, I’d rather have thought about these issues, than not know about them at all.