April 2005

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How many times have you typed something in Google to be asked “Did you mean: ….” Next time you reach this page, stay a little longer and take a look at the pages that Google did find. This is your gateway to the parallel universe of misspelled words. Well let me correct myself — these “misspelled” words can belong to a different language altogether or they even might be rarely used genuine English words with close resemblance to the heavily used ones.

An entire gamut of information is being denied to us due to mere errors in spelling. To deride these spelling mistakes as “mere errors in spelling” is to ignore a small minority of people who deliberately misspell words so as to make their pages less publicly accessible. This works as an effective low-tech solution for every underground society has demands obscurity.

Then there are people who exploit misspellings to make their living e.g. People searching auction sites like eBay for misspelled (or mislabeled) items, and hence hopefully underbid items. (* eBay now offers a spell-check utility but surprisingly few people still refuse to use it.)

Excepting eBay entrepreneurs, one thing that is clear is that we are “losing”‘ this increasingly vast pool of information containing misspelled “keywords” (words we type in a search engine). There is an argument to be made that the quality of information source with misspelled words may itself be poor and hence we needn’t worry about the “lost” information. Arguably, the frequency of misspelled words in a peer reviewed journal is much lower than say my blog. ;) The normative question is, Does that rightly consign my blog to obscurity?

Internet search is a classic case of finding needle in a haystack, and search algorithms are built of dispense with as much “clutter” (hay) as fast as possible, leaving a very small minority of websites that are given genuine value. What we are seeing are two trends implicit in Google’s search algorithm — most of our search needs are about “popular”‘ items (given a higher rank by Google), and it is progressively harder to find “unpopular” sources. On the face of it the trend is innocuous and even sensible but the wider ramifications include information hegemony.

Let us turn the discussion around to sites that use “syntactically correct but meaningless verbiage including commons search terms” (a sentence like “Indeed, a blind crenelation blasphemously a player inside the stictomys. For example, a whopper behind a ferrocyanide indicates that the saccharinity behind a casino tropez another euphausiacea from another modem.”) People also “Google bomb” (mass posting on blogs/lists associating a search phrase with online address). Some sites have in fact automated this by writing programs that automatically go to different blogs/lists and post entries/comments like “poker chips poker – [web address].” This problem is much worse as it is making it progressively harder for us to find “genuine” (or most popular/reliable) information.

So will there be too much seemingly reliable unreliable information or will we miss a lot of seemingly unreliable reliable information. Chances are that both will happen.

Those who keep an eye on the Amazon.com’s bestsellers list would have already noticed that Friedman’s latest effort in punditry sits at number three on the charts. Friedman, the “mid-east scholar”, has of late sunk into crooning pithies about economics, especially globalization. He started his liaison with economics with “The Lexus and the Olive tree” and has now come with a book which rehashes all the old arguments without any extra zing – well except for the title which oozes hyperbolic charm.

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century is a book that is thoroughly bankrupt of any new ideas. That’s not reason enough to stay away from it especially if you have been hibernating in Siberia for the past 15 or so years and have missed the entire debate on globalization. Let me step down from my “Dowdian” (pun intended) verbal gymnastics and go into the main course.

Well the book is about how globalization is increasingly leveling the playing field. It is part alarmist and part congratulatory of the phenomenon for globalization knifes through both ways – while it increases opportunity for the Bangalore geek, it simultaneously makes life more competitive for the kid in Brooklyn. Nothing new here especially for most of us who have been doing the quick step with our resume’ in the employment market without any audience. The book is full of alarmist statistics and can be read as a recipe for protectionism by even more clueless policy wonks.

What Friedman doesn’t quite explicate is that increase in tariffs, protectionism etc. were the cause of the first major market meltdown of a globalized marketplace – the great depression. Friedman also pays little attention to the fact that that world is still a, and will continue to be a very diverse place. In fact a truly “flat” world would mean that there would be no incentive for trade.

What Friedman does get correct or states partially correct is that Capitalism is headed towards a race to the bottom. Capitalists will move production from US to Mexico to China to India to Somalia to slave colonies… you get the idea.. to for not only cheap labor but to bypass environmental legislation, taxes, law itself or accountability. These are admittedly unhappy scenarios but then we here wrongly assume that capitalism is a system without breaks when in fact it may very well have a good breaking system.

So yeah, the final verdict is: read more. Friedman can get you started in the topic with a language as facile as his argument. But then go on and read Stiglitz, Bhagwati and Sachs for flat world is not enough!