Editorial

by Jon Fairall

^{To Google or Not to Goodle}

The paranoia that surrounded the APEC heads of government meeting in Sydney in September had some lessons for spatial engineers, although amid all the photo-ops and the brou ha-ha on the streets you may have not have noticed.

Google has reduced the resolution of images of the Sydney CBD on its Google Earth website. The new imagery also has a very low sun angle, so deep shadows are present around all the buildings and many streets are just not visible.

A Google spokesman told a newspaper that the reduction in resolution is due to commercial contractual arrangements.

I’m frankly puzzled. What sort of commercial arrangements? Similar reductions in image quality have not happened in the CBDs of other Australian cities, even though the data is attributed to the same sources.

Moreover, it’s really hard to imagine what sort of contractual arrangements could lead a major international player to replace perfectly good imagery with material most aerial survey companies wouldn’t let out the door.

Does this smell like a conspiracy or a cock up? Who can say?

Hard as it is to image Google’s quality control letting the images through, it’s equally hard to imagine a scenario in which such a strategy could seriously confound a moderately determined terrorist. Sadly however, that’s not a good enough reason to discount the hand of military intelligence.

One good thing – the spatial industry is not alone. Google’s more general search engine offerings suffer from the same problems of opaqueness.

Increasingly, the internet is how we obtain information. It is certainly the primary tool for journalistic enquiry. But the internet is a big place. If you want to find relevant material, you need search engines.

How do they work? We don’t know. Sure, there is a lot of general information out there, but if you have ever tried to optimise a page to ensure that it will be discovered by a search engine, you will know they are mysterious beasts indeed.

Do they provide an objective response to your enquiries? No they don’t. We can see that simply by comparing the same search in a number of different search engines.

This has enormous social and political ramifications. He (or she) who controls the search engines controls a lot of your impression of the world. In China, Google has agreed to de-list certain pages. As a result, many Chinese people think that the Tibetans are grateful.

Last month, in Kuala Lumpur for the Map Asia conference, I listened to a presentation from Google’s chief technology officer, Michael Jones. In response to a question from the floor, Jones admitted that Google was having difficulty managing its relations with governments.

As a commercial enterprise, its predilection is to supply as much data as its consumers want.

It’s no surprise that not all governments are happy with that. What is surprising is why the search engine giant would allow anti-democratic bureaucrats in places such as China, India, or for that matter – Australia – to impose self censorship on the company.

Jones did not propose any new ethical standards to govern the company’s behaviour – or venture what inducements Australian bureaucrats might have made to cause it to change its imagery.

This matters to many readers of this magazine. We hear so much about the extent to which Google has seized the imagination of the public that it often obscures the real story.

The fact is, Google Earth has seized the imagination of industry practitioners. The industry likes it because it provides such an elegant way of displaying data. Google has solved the problem of displaying your dataset to the best advantage to as many clients as you want.

Even more promising, it has solved the problem of displaying your data – and someone else’s – together. Mashups are great business.

The problem with this scenario is that it makes Google a business partner. Alternatively, you might like to say it makes Google part of the computing and communications infrastructure. You design your business applications on the assumption that the infrastructure is a known quantity.

What happens if it’s not? If Google is as stable as a bank – you can trust it with the Crown Jewels. But if Google is unstable and unpredictable… well, caveat emptor.

This clearly represents a problem for Google’s management. Google has been a refreshingly honest company for the IT space. That’s not hard; it puts out no press releases, and its executives rarely give interviews. It never promices anything it can’t deliver because it never promises anything.

Admirable? Perhaps; but if you wanted to be unkind, you could call this a mania for secrecy. The company is so paranoid that its Sydney office – apparently one of its centres of expertise in mapping technology and therefore the most significant site in Australia – doesn’t even have a listed telephone number.

Stuff happens at Google, and the market loves it – or it doesn’t. From the industry’s point of view, it doesn’t mattter a jot whether the dead hand of military intelligence is at work or not. What matters is that we do not know.

And the more the industry depends on Google, the greater this problem will become.

Jon Fairall is the editor of Position

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(This page last modified on 2 October 2007)