Every time a person with a Web site links to another site, he is expressing a judgement. He is declaring that he considers the other site important. Sergey Brin and Larry Page further realized that while every link on the Web contains a little bit of human intelligence, all the links combined contain a great deal of intelligence – far more, in fact, than any individual mind could possible possess. Google’s search engine mines that intelligence, link by link, and uses it to determine the importance of all the pages on the Web. The greater number of links that lead to a site, the greater its value. As John Markoff puts it, Google’s software ‘systematically exploits human knowledge and decisions about what is significant.’ Every time we write a link, or even click on one, we are feeding our intelligence into Google’s system. We are making the machine a little smarter – and Brin, Page, and all of Google’s shareholders a little richer. – The Big Switch, rewiring the world from Edison to Google, Nicholas Carr
Wij vervullen al lang de rol van Mechanical Turks.
We work for the machine.