Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cousin_it | Hacker News Reader

So 1) spend many paragraphs describing the sinister idea of "birds of a feather" tracking 2) link to a grant that mentions "query flocks", which are similar to parameterized SQL queries and unrelated to "birds of a feather" tracking 3) Larry and Sergey got money from that grant as students, though their eventual result was unrelated to that, as often happens 4) conspiracy confirmed.

> Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted—essentially identifying “birds of a feather”

What is this talking about? I'd love to give the author a quick quiz on PageRank. (It's about the link structure of websites, not about queries. Google gave amazing results based on that, long before they had high query volume, that's how they got successful.)

The older I get, the more I realize how damaging Gell-Mann amnesia is. When you read an article making big claims, check the part that intersects with your specialty. If that part is lazy or dishonest, so is the rest of the article.

Looks like the journalist is trying to convince us that Google is in fact a company created by the CIA. It's amazing that the CIA had already predicted that Google would beat Yahoo!, Lycos, Altavista, and Ask.com in 1995.

They make the CIA sound positively competent.

The belief in competent government would seem to be a logical flaw -- or at least inconsistency -- in most conspiracy theorizing. I'm sometimes shocked by how competent people think the government can be -- especially people with so little faith in government.

Adam Curtis: Bugger, Maybe The Real State Secret Is That Spies Aren't Very Good At Their Jobs And Don't Know Very Much About The World

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9...

> The belief in competent government would seem to be a logical flaw

Only to someone ideologically blinkered or completely ignorant of history. There are countless examples of governments achieving all sorts of highly non-straightforward things both for good and for bad. Even the CIA, which will probably not make it onto many shortlists of history's most competent governmental organizations had its successes.

The real qualifer of signficance is depending upon perfect competence. Which is utterly unrealistic like the "car which runs on water being covered up". Although that example has ample other logical flaws including the fact that it would be a great thing for logistics if possible.

I keep seeing this idea of an incompetent government come up repeatedly.

What people don't understand is that it is precisely this incompetence which allows corporations to manipulate the government so well. Laws and regulations do not originate within governments. They originate from lobbyists who are working in the interest of corporations and other large financial interests.

When discussing the economy, some people will keep insisting that capitalism is the most intelligent collective system possible, yet when it comes to politics, they will make it seem like capitalism is the dumbest system in the world, utterly incompetent at implementing perverse economic agendas... So I guess the view must be that capitalism maximizes the extraction of value from every kind of activity except when those activities relate to the government?

Clearly this makes no sense. Why would capitalism's efficiency at leveraging the collective intelligence stop at politics?

I'm not sure if it's original, but the book American Gods had a good joke about this.

"How do you know the CIA didn't kill JFK?"

South Park had an episode where it was revealed that Dick Cheney and other Bush II administration officials were behind a conspiracy to promote 9/11 inside job conspiracy theories in order to convince the world they were actually competent enough to pull such a thing off.

Why? From a government agency perspective, you don't have to predict who will win, you just throw money at all of them.

I haven't read the article entirely because it very quickly started to feel like a conspiracy piece by avoiding the topic as long as possible, but I'm sure if any of the other search engines succeeded then we'd be seeing people digging up whatever dirt they could on them.

I'm sure there was some input from american surveillance in the creation of a lot of modern computer tools, but this would be indirect influence at best, and the three letter agencies gambling on already existing technology at worst.

Alternatively, they could simply have invested in every tech company at the time. Today, it's rather well known that some 3 letter agencies have an uncomfortable relationship (sometimes not even a consensual one) with large companies. It's not unthinkable to me that an organization like the CIA could have had a hand in 'supporting' businesses like Google.

On the other hand, I can totally imagine that having some support from the government itself could be a pretty significant advantage. Perhaps even enough of one to become a market leader.

With all that said, I hardly need a grand conspiracy to dislike both Google and organizations like the CIA.

This article is basically a conspiracy theory

Perhaps the detractors in this thread could comment on this:

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

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