A Prelude to a Post ... or, Is Google the World's Most Crowdsourcey Company?

This is just the stuff for a half-baked, Friday evening post when my traffic begins to dive into the weekend lull.

I'm going to admit this right now: There's one big, glaring omission in my book, and it's Google. While I devote a few pages here and there to the Mountain View Monolith, I hardly give it the attention it deserves. You'd think writing a book would provide enough space to do anything. In fact, it's an exercise in reduction. I wound up taking a chunk on Google Earth out entirely, and by the time Android was launched I was already in edits. But for the record, I believe a separate Crowdsourcing book could be written using Google as one single, fat case study.

And that's good. Because a writer's blog is sort of an ongoing appendix to his book. I want to lay out the areas in which Google is crowdsourcing. Ideally, I'll revisit each of the bullet points below in more depth in the coming weeks (Ed's Note: Emphasis in previous sentence mine. Jeff is too ...mercurial, let's say, in his posting habits to make promises of future content).

• Google Earth: See Sketch-Up

• GoogleMaps: See Google MapMaker

• PageRank: I write about this in Chapter 8. It's a tad controversial to cram this most elemental part of the Web under the Crowdsourcing banner, but in the end I decided it'd be erroneous not to include it.

• Android

• Google Answers

• Google Moderator

And I'm leaving lots of stuff out. I gotta go home and bathe my kids. I'll try to come back to this post over the weekend. In the meantime, let's consider this a group working paper. I know I have Googlers out there reading this! I'm issuing an open call to add to my list.

Comments

[John Yunker]

Google has relied on the crowds to help it translate its many language interfaces -- more so in the early days. But it still uses crowds to help it correct errors in its machine translation engine. And I expect a crowd component in its forthcoming Google Translation Center.

JY

[Mark Harmel]

You can add the Google Knol project that is both seeded by experts and Crowdsourced by citizen experts. The plan is to have it be a more authoritative Wikipedia, but I haven't heard much buzz about the project since its launch in July.

If not, a place to begin (with a shameless plug) is my wife's seeded expert Knols on type 1 and type 2 diabetes.

http://knol.google.com/k/anne-peters/type-2-diabetes/NWhjxSXZ/lg_ybA#

http://knol.google.com/k/anne-peters/type-1-diabetes/VxIOS9KU/QWqllQ#

The home page is: http://knol.google.com/

Has anyone else used the site?

[Theory Shaw]

Google Lively, especially when compared to the user-generated content of virtual worlds like Second Life, but that's the angle, i persume, you were hinting at in offering up Google Sketchup in your list. Google is dangerously close, if not there already, of establishing a seamless conduit of bringing Sketchup content into Lively.

[Jeff Howe]

Duh. Knol and translation. Thanks guys ... And thanks Theory for the tip re: Lively, with which I wasn't familiar.

[Jeff Howe]

Duh. Knol and translation. Thanks guys ... And thanks Theory for the tip re: Lively, with which I wasn't familiar.

[Jeff Howe]

Duh. Knol and translation. Thanks guys ... And thanks Theory for the tip re: Lively, with which I wasn't familiar.

[Digidave]

Jeff Jarvis is just finishing up his book "What Would Google Do."

That might be a good place to get some background/research/ideas.

[John Beck Real Estate]

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[Henk van Ess]

Google Answers is not taking new questions, so please update that update ;). I would include http://www.google.org/flutrends and Google Suggests, now part of the search box. When I think about it, there are more examples. Take http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-searchwiki.html . I'm getting reports that sites are actually been removed when a lot of users flag them as inappropriate.

But there is a deeper crowd sourcing going on. I'm talking about the collective data of all searche(r)s. I think you should include this in an update. Even such a simple thing like f.e Google Alerts or Google News is a data miners dream. Google sees what the public finds important to follow. With that, they can convince advertisers to sell keywords, make new services and find patterns. You can see this patterns here: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Google promised not to sell ads in Google Health. They don't need to. Thanks to the crowd they will know exactly what people have in mind when they are sick and that's a gold mine for the normal search engine, www.google.com.

The aggregated data from the public also change the way we see the web through Google. Thanks to crowd sourcing (searching in Google), the listings are changed. More popular searches, only in big numbers, affect how Google indexes websites. When a site gets a lot of searches, it's updated more often by Google, resulting in more documents, resulting in more changes that people want the information, resulting in more searches.

If you need more feedback or a sparring partner, just click on my LinkedIn profile to find me.

[Henk van Ess]

sorry for the typo's, should have feed the baby first ;)