May 16, 2006

Though Google Reader learns to share, I haven’t found it easy to see what others are reading. Even a Google search for shared lists reveals very few.

Search engines rank their own sites better. Yahoo Answers ranks higher on Yahoo, but not on MSN or Google. Google Answers ranks high on Google, but not on Yahoo or MSN. This is bias, but not necessarily evil. They may just be fooling themselves. Even scientists, the genuinely objective ones, do this. As Feynman points out in Cargo Cult Science: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. ...