Web Dragons and Basic Car Care for Women

I’ve been work­ing for over a week on a review of the book Web Dragons:Inside the Myth of the Search Engines. My drafts are copi­ous and they all suck for one rea­son or another. So in a fit of hav­ing to get some damn thing out by the end of the week I give you:

This book is Basic Search Engine Care for Peo­ple with­out Library or Com­puter Sci­ence Degrees.

For more then the 20 years a num­ber of com­mu­nity col­leges have offered classes in basic car care that were aimed at women. A nice avun­cu­lar gent in a shop coat talked about things like:

• What an engine is and how it works.
• Which noises com­ing from under the car are actu­ally dan­ger­ous and which are just annoying.
• How to change a tire when the AAA truck can’t come for two hours and you have a meet­ing with your boss in 30 minutes.
• How often to take you car to Jiffy Lube for an oil change and why it really does matter.
• How to deal with a mechanic and not get taken.

I never took one of these courses because I know what car­bu­re­tor means (no, it is not French for don’t fuck with it) but lord knows I have some friends and rel­a­tives who damn well should .

Search engines are just like cars. We all use them every­day, and we all assume that they will work prop­erly when we need them, and most of us have no idea how they work.

This book is like that Basic Car Care for Women (and other Non-Gear Heads) class. It starts with a lit­tle talk from the teacher(s) about what they mean to do in the class and what we can expect. Then there’s a lit­tle his­tory les­son. In this case, a tour thought the ages start­ing with the first the­o­ries about what knowl­edge is (every­one wave at Plato!) and end­ing with the cur­rent projects aimed at dig­i­tiz­ing all of our lit­er­a­ture. Like the his­tory les­son in the car class whether or not its amus­ing or deadly dull depends on the teacher. Wit­ten and his garage mates aren’t ter­ri­bly funny but they are not dull because they really love this stuff and that enthu­si­asm shows.

After a cof­fee and intro­duce your­self to your neigh­bors break you move out into the shop and sit on the work­benches while the garage guys talk you through the basic parts of a car and how they work together.

In Web Drag­ons you get a chap­ter that describes the web and how it’s built and then a chap­ter that describes what search engines are and how they work. Depend­ing on your pro­cliv­i­ties you’re either going to find this fas­ci­nat­ing beyond belief or just a bit tedious. Stay with us here, this is the impor­tant part.

Wit­ten and his posse are good teach­ers. This is com­plex stuff and they make a good job of point­ing out all the pieces and how they work together. The expla­na­tions of the dif­fer­ent ways of mea­sur­ing and map­ping the web are lovely exam­ples of mak­ing some­thing as sim­ple as pos­si­ble but no sim­pler. For all that the sci­ence involved is heav­ily math based, I had no trou­ble fol­low­ing along. Sure I missed one or two bits that had some­thing to do with geom­e­try but my under­stand­ing of the ideas wasn’t harmed by it.

So now that you all know what these search engine things are and how they work, its time to look at how things go wrong. Or rather a few of the things that can go wrong. This is “Basic Car Care” not “The­ory of Fuel Deliv­ery Sys­tems” so don’t expect any­thing ter­ri­bly inidepth. Wit­ten et al, deliver up some of the sim­pler tech­niques that are used to mess about with search results and some of the ways that the web and the search engines go about try­ing to counter those problems.

Then you have to sit through the oblig­a­tory lec­ture on respon­si­bil­ity and safe dri­ving and how there are irre­spon­si­ble peo­ple out there and what you can do to keep your­self safe from the lousy dri­vers. It’s dull but you can pull out some bits of wis­dom from behind the party line. Or at least get a good idea of what the party line is.

The last bit where they pre­dict the future of cars is always fun — any­one remem­ber fly­ing cars? How about your very own per­son­al­ized search­bot that brings you the results from the Puget Sound Trail­ers web site after every trial with your favorite rid­ers results high­lighted in red?

So why do you care that you now under­stand the basics of how the web is built and how search engines work? For the same rea­son you care that you know what to call the parts of your car and how they work together. Because now you don’t have to freak out at every noise the silly thing makes, you know when to get your oil changed, and when you do have a prob­lem the local ForChry­Hon­LexWhat­Ever dealer won’t be able to charge you $450 dol­lars for a muf­fler bear­ing change.

Knowl­edge is power and igno­rance costs. Whether your head gas­ket is leak­ing or your search for “improv­ing gas mileage” has returned a link to a seller of the Super­Fu­el­MAX Pro.

Just in case you did find your­self look­ing into this device you might also want to have a look at: The FTC case sum­mary.