Betsy Devine: “Questions you can't answer with search engine data: Why are we here? Who wrote Shakespeare's sonnets? Can anonymous spammers make my package bigger? Question you can answer with search engine data: Who gets more play in online news media--Dean or Kerry?”
Other questions you can answer with search engine data: what's the phone number of the local chapter of the white pride association? (I found the answer in 3 minutes using a search engine. I had to "settle" for an email address, though.) Which abortion doctors should I kill? (Took longer than expected, but I did find an essay defending the practice, which would probably be "good enough".) Where can I find child pornography? (Not gonna bother.)
Search engines “can help us solve problems, some of them important, that would be very much harder to solve without them.” Search engines made it easy to "solve" all of the above "problems"—and some of them are "important" to some people.
Betsy Devine is doing interesting work with an interesting site, Feedster. (Did I mention that Betsy Devine is herself interesting? Perhaps another sentence with interesting in it will help strengthen that point...) Feedster is something I haven't had enough time playing with, but it seems cool. I'm just saying that, just like everything else, search engines introduce costs to society as well as benefits.
