Status w Sieci

YOUR GUIDE TO STATUS: VIRTUAL WORTH

In book Status Anxiety, philosopher Alain de Botton defines status as "one's value and importance in the eyes of the world." He sees it as a source of great worry, but also a fundamental part of life in our consumer-obsessed world. Whether it's a blessing or a curse may depend on whether or not you have it, but status is definitely a concept that begs a closer look.

YOU'RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR HIT COUNT

Own up - you've Googled yourself. What six years ago might have sounded like a faintly perverse euphemism is today standard practice for those looking to see what of clout their name holds in the digital universe. As the Internet continues to integrate itself into out daily lives, the practice of measuring status has moved online, with several new manifestations of status popping up in the context of cyberspace - JOEL MCCONVEY/DOSE

Google

David A. Vise, the author of The Google Story, has compared the monolithic search engine to the printing press in its ability to grant individuals access to information. Since Google works numerically - the more hits a search term gets, the higher it sits in the information hierarchy - it's no surprise that people have started assigning value beyond visibility to hits. A whole sub-industry has sprouted up around the practice of tracking information on Google's index of web pages, but the personal practice of Googling one's self has also caught on, providing a way for people to assign a numerical value to their onling presence. "(A high number of Google hits) doesn't necessarily mean you are a good person, a positive person or a functional person," say Dean Michael Behrens, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto. "But it means you are a person that people are interested in" (DOSE 262 Thursday 13 April 2006).

http://WWW.GAHOOYOOGLE.COM/

If you ever feel like you're not getting the full story from your search engine of choice, you might want to give the simple but surprisingly useful GahooYoogle Web Site a shot. The site takes your search query (Web, image, news and shopping searches are all on the table) and returns the results generated by both the Yahoo! and Google search functions on a split screen, allowing you to compare and contrast the information that the two industry leaders come up with.
The tool is fantastic for those addicted to vanity-Googling themselves by running searches on their own name (not that I'd know about such a thing) - just think, it's all about you, but twice as much as before! For the less self-absorbed, GahooYoogle speeds legitimate research since each search engine really does tend to turn up a few sites that the other will miss. Far better to see all the results set out before your eyes at once, rather than doing separate searches and having to use notes or memory to determine what's a repeat and what's fresh information.
If you're a true cybergeek, you may also enjoy analyzing the differing results as a means of judging who has the better search algorithm and display design.
From my point of view, it's hard not to be a bit soft on Yahoo! since their "Marni Soupcoff" search turned up about three times as many results as Google's (Marni Soupcoff, "Click Here", NATIONAL POST, Wednesday, March 8, 2006).