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now Altavista sucks
Saturday, July 3 1999
Yesterday while I was doing my search for long-lost college chums on Altavista, I noticed I wasn't getting any results with links to any of the over one thousand web pages on my Spies website. This has the ring of an Elly Cyberpie tempest in a teapot, I know, but bear me out here.
This lack of Spies results was definitely odd, considering I've usually mentioned both the first and last names of historical people in my life, and all this stuff was in the Altavista database just a couple months ago when I last checked. In the evening today I was smoking lots of pot and sprucing up my controversial Trenchcoat Mafia web page and suddenly it hit me just what might have happened.
In the aftermath of the Littleton shooting spree, you see, people far and wide got on that wild and crazy internet thing and did rubbernecking searches for anything they could find about this weird group of juvenile delinquents who mixed European Industrial rock music, trench coats, bomb making, violent videogames, suburban comic-book racism and web pages into something about as Goth as Johnny Cash. Back when I first made my Trenchcoat Mafia page, I'd been hoping to capitalize on those searches, since a sizable fraction of those doing them no doubt had a recreational interest in the macabre not unlike my own. But some of those rubberneckers were self-appointed content police, with a vigilante mission to report anything they could find to authorities. The web "master" of Spies actually received a few emails threatening to turn the matter over to the FBI if the Trenchcoat Mafia page wasn't removed within 48 hours. I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if some people sent letters of complaint directly to Altavista for simply being able to find my site. In a minty-fresh Liddy Dole World, a search for "coke" would return www.cocacola.com, not "How Cocaine helped me improve my GPA."
I went to do Altavista searches for the characteristic things found exclusively on my website, such as the string "Big Fun Glossary," but the only referrals I received were to non-Spies sites which use those strings as link descriptions.
I received some feedback from correspondents on this issue and soon discovered that Altavista was no longer the mechanically objective tool that I once faithfully relied upon. As I surfed the new Altavista site, it was a little like experiencing the death of a friend. Companies can now purchase "relevant keyword result placements" that are sold via online auction. And now, beyond purging whole domains from their database, Altavista also has a "default family filter setting" and several other restrictive settings, all designed ostensibly to protect the precious children. These settings are easily disabled if one is willing to attest to being "over eighteen years of age" (thus, presumably, not quite so precious). But anyone who has been around knows that once this sort of thing starts, it's only a matter of time before the search engine is useless for the kinds of searches any truly curious person would ever want to do. Who, after all, is making the decisions about what Altavista's filters are filtering? And, as I've already shown, some things, such as every page in the Spies.com domain, can never be found using Altavista, no matter what settings the filters have. That stuff has been removed simply because o.oo1% of it is morally-reprehensible to the ironically-challenged.
If it was just Spies.com that had been removed from the Altavista database, it would be a bad thing, but it wouldn't drive me crazy. But the fact is that this sort of thing is indicative of a new pattern of behaviour for what had been my favourite search engine. They no longer have an unbiased mechanical objectivity. They are now governed by the easily-offended and they, like Netnanny and other problematic filtering technologies, use nuclear bombs to swat flies. The thing that I find personally troublesome is that Altavista had been how I found new sites on the web. Now it's clear that if I want to find controversial content on the web, I have to change my technique. What's even more scary is that Altavista may not be the only search engine meddling with my search results. Others, such as Infoseek, have done this sort of thing before. I think for the time being I'll be moving most of my searches to HotBot or perhaps Google, which is thankfully still in Beta and searching for a niche of absolute objectivity in the crowded search engine market.
To see what the corporate line is on this sort of behaviour, this evening I sent the following email search-support@altavista.com:
Dear _____:
Recently I noticed that all references to sites on the Spies.com domain
had been purged from your database. Spies.com contains a great many
personal pages belonging to several dozen individuals. I am not its
webmaster, but I am formally requesting information as to why and when
this occurred, and whether it was intentional or a mistake.
If it wasn't a mistake, please inform me about the practice of purging
your database of domains, especially with regard to the reasons a
particular domain might be removed. For example, might one be removed
because of specific kinds of content? Do you ever purge domains at the
behest of corporations, the government, or individuals? Do you know of
any other search engines that do similar things?
Sincerely,
Gus Mueller
xxx@spies.com
http://spies.com/~gus/ran
At night, while Kim was at work, a bunch of sexually frustrated guys from work randomly showed up. They were all the regulars who often come by, with the addition of one of the sales guys named Mike. I didn't have any beer in the refrigerator; the only thing I had was an doggy bone shaped ash tray filled with schwaggy Mexican pot. Not all of the guys from work smoke the stuff, but the vast majority of them do.
We had plans of going out somewhere, to a party or something, but Kevin and Mike were exhausted from a full day of partying. When Scott and I returned from walking Sophie around the block, we found them passed out on the two new white couches Kim bought the other day. Al showed up a little later with his friend Jeremy. The conversation was mostly the sort of banter guys engage in when they're together and there are no chicks (except maybe Sophie) present. Every now and then a good sausage party is just what the doctor ordered. I'm not saying it necessarily was the case tonight, however.
After the other guys left, Al, Jeremey and I hung out talking about, of all things, evolutionary theory. The conversation veered wildly between being a lecture, a quiz show, and an essay test. It's been my experience that the vast majority of people in America, even well educated people, are very fuzzy in their knowledge of exactly what modern evolutionary theory says about the acquisition and inheritance of traits. While many college-educated people believe in evolution, like Darwin himself, they also believe Lamarckian mechanisms account for intergenerational changes. I wasn't too surprised to discover that Al's knowledge of evolution was at this primitive level; far more surprising was Jeremey agreeing with me while I debated these points with Al. We discussed the species of European moth that turned from black to white during the industrial revolution and then back to white with the decline of the burning of coal. Al seemed to think that individual moths somehow made a decision, subconsciously of course, to change colours, or else were influenced by their environment to change. "Somehow" this influence caused their genes to change. In Al's attempt to explain these changes, he never got to the harsh reality of massive death, of white moths being ruthlessly plucked off darkened birches by hungry birds. To him, the changes from one generation to the next were essentially magical. When I asked him directly what the mechanism was, he'd say nothing more than "nature." This is the sort of fuzzy thinking that takes conversations absolutely nowhere. It might work for new-agers and cult recruits, but not for me. "Nature" is not an explanation for anything. In this particular example, "Hungry birds feasting on the white moths and not seeing the black ones" was the answer I wanted.
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