06 Apr What Does Google Think of Harold Koh?
06.04.06
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10 Comments
Harold Koh is having a brilliant career: Supreme Court clerk, advocate for Haitian refugees, seminal scholar, public servant under the Clinton Administration, dean of the Yale Law School. These are the things we think of when we think of Harold Koh.
But what does Google think of Harold Koh? Google Harold Koh and one of the top three references is an Opinio Juris’ commentary on his testimony opposing the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez. This strikes me as odd in the extreme.
There is something strange that is occurring in the digital world. Scholars who spend years building their careers are thought of in the digital world in peculiar ways. It is quite sobering to go to Google, type in the names of great scholars like Jack Goldsmith, Ted Meron, Sarah Cleveland, Allison Danner, or Larry Helfer, and one of the top references for each of these scholars is a post on Opinio Juris.
And of course the same is true for other great scholars in other fields of the law. For good or for ill, blogs are shaping how the digital world thinks of truly giant scholars. What does Google think of Larry Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky, Geoffrey Stone, Steven Calabresi, Anthony Kronman, Doug Laycock, or Burt Neuborne? For each scholar one of the very top references is from a blog, be it major blogs like SCOTUSblog or DailyKos, or relatively obscure ones like Disability Law Blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, or The ’04 Wall.
There is a great divide between the true face of legal scholars and the digital face that is presented by Google. In my view there is something wrong with the Internet when Google prominently identifies a great scholar based on an occasional post in a blog. It suggests that to the digital eye passing references on the Internet are permanent, but yeoman’s work in the real world of scholarship, advocacy, and administration is more ephemeral.
To be sure, the answer to this problem is not less blogging, but more content. Somehow a fuller picture of legal scholars needs to be presented to Google so it can be presented by Google. We as scholars all have an interest in Google presenting the true measure of the great men and women of our field. The question is how? How do we get the true face of great scholars on the Internet? Perhaps we should pay even greater attention to what we put on SSRN. Perhaps we should more seriously consider the importance of our Internet faculty bios, knowing that the next reference in a Google search will be a poor substitute. Or perhaps we should openly embrace the notion of a digital biography, whether on Wikipedia or elsewhere. Given that all scholars will be remembered on the Internet in one way or another, why not present a more accurate picture? I would far prefer a detailed entry in Wikipedia as one of the top hits for a scholar than a passing comment from a blog.
But even then there are no guarantees. The Wikipedia entry for Harold Koh is fourth in a Google search, just below an Opinio Juris entry, and just above a blog post by a law clerk about Harold Koh and Texas Hold’em.
But what does Google think of Harold Koh? Google Harold Koh and one of the top three references is an Opinio Juris’ commentary on his testimony opposing the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez. This strikes me as odd in the extreme.
There is something strange that is occurring in the digital world. Scholars who spend years building their careers are thought of in the digital world in peculiar ways. It is quite sobering to go to Google, type in the names of great scholars like Jack Goldsmith, Ted Meron, Sarah Cleveland, Allison Danner, or Larry Helfer, and one of the top references for each of these scholars is a post on Opinio Juris.
And of course the same is true for other great scholars in other fields of the law. For good or for ill, blogs are shaping how the digital world thinks of truly giant scholars. What does Google think of Larry Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky, Geoffrey Stone, Steven Calabresi, Anthony Kronman, Doug Laycock, or Burt Neuborne? For each scholar one of the very top references is from a blog, be it major blogs like SCOTUSblog or DailyKos, or relatively obscure ones like Disability Law Blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, or The ’04 Wall.
There is a great divide between the true face of legal scholars and the digital face that is presented by Google. In my view there is something wrong with the Internet when Google prominently identifies a great scholar based on an occasional post in a blog. It suggests that to the digital eye passing references on the Internet are permanent, but yeoman’s work in the real world of scholarship, advocacy, and administration is more ephemeral.
To be sure, the answer to this problem is not less blogging, but more content. Somehow a fuller picture of legal scholars needs to be presented to Google so it can be presented by Google. We as scholars all have an interest in Google presenting the true measure of the great men and women of our field. The question is how? How do we get the true face of great scholars on the Internet? Perhaps we should pay even greater attention to what we put on SSRN. Perhaps we should more seriously consider the importance of our Internet faculty bios, knowing that the next reference in a Google search will be a poor substitute. Or perhaps we should openly embrace the notion of a digital biography, whether on Wikipedia or elsewhere. Given that all scholars will be remembered on the Internet in one way or another, why not present a more accurate picture? I would far prefer a detailed entry in Wikipedia as one of the top hits for a scholar than a passing comment from a blog.
But even then there are no guarantees. The Wikipedia entry for Harold Koh is fourth in a Google search, just below an Opinio Juris entry, and just above a blog post by a law clerk about Harold Koh and Texas Hold’em.
Roger, I’m sorry, but this seems to me a case of much ado over nothing. Who, pray tell, relies on the first results from a google search to learn about important figures in the field of international law scholarship? I suspect the answer would be something on the order of ‘not anyone whose judgment we need worry about.’ In other words, those happy idiots who would do such a thing are the kinds of individuals who don’t read labels on the packages of food they purchase (in fact, for most purposes, they’re functionally illiterate), don’t vote, believe they’re entitled by God to drive whatever gas-guzzling behemoth they can afford, think rules apply to everyone but them, don’t serve on juries, kill animals for sport, wouldn’t pay taxes if they could get away with it but will scream holy hell after a disaster for the government to help them out, believe daily life is akin to the Hobbesian state of nature, are not troubled at all by the social consequences of gambling sanctioned and encouraged by public agencies, are not ‘good samaritans,’ talk on cell phones while shopping, driving, or any damn time or place they please, fail to abide by… Read more »
And please pardon any typos (e.g., ‘Opinion Juris’) in the above as I had yet to finish my first cup of tea this morning when I sat down to write.
I concur, mostly, with Mr. O’Donnell’s point. We are talking about the Internet and Google, after all. It’s more than a little naive to wonder genuinely about the quality of information effortlessly gleaned from this global billboard and, worse, it’s complicitous to suggest that scholars ought to join the advertising fray to remedy the situation. But I take exception to Mr. O’Donnell’s catalog of “happy idiots.” I’m not automatically opposed to elitism of this sort, but I grow uncomfortable when I detect contours of my own character in his sketch. For instance, there are times when I “believe daily life is akin to the Hobbesian state of nature.” More to the point, these “happy idiots” are not merely our bumpkin neighbors, colleagues, and family members. They are themselves scholars, business leaders, politicians, and so forth. Who knows? Maybe Harold Koh keeps abreast of career opportunities on the ‘net.
Fair enough: I admit my list/description is not too objective, indeed, rather idiosyncratic and personal, figurative and rhetorical. And, as I say, I don’t exempt myself, on occasion, from falling within its net. I didn’t want to pussyfoot around, but perhaps as a result I stepped on a few toes or even shot myself in the foot.
Try googling these scholars with their “publication name”, which in the case of Koh would include his middle initial or middle name – slightly different and perhaps better results? I think scholars should try to consistently use their full name with middle name or initial in all publications, such that searches for their published work will come up differently than searches for their name generally.
I don’t view the matter of page rank within Google to be an insignificant matter. The phenomenon I am describing is the issue of so-called Google juice: the ability of a website to turn up as a top entry in a variety of searches. Blogs have tremendous “Google juice” compared to other sites, and traffic flows to those sites as a result. Of course, a reader can discern a faculty page from a blog in a Google search. But the impact of blogs is they can impact public impressions of the scholar. If you are say, Erwin Chemerinsky, is it insignificant that one of the top hits for him is a blog post asserting that he is a flip-flopper on filibusters?
This last suggestion by Mr. Ostrovsky is sensible and fascinating at once. It is an instance of a broader phenomenon I perceive in online knowledge management, namely, everything old is becoming new again. The concept of “publication name,” as Mr. Ostrovsky refers to it, is precisely what libraries have long deemed “authority work,” which entails establishing settled forms of names, titles, etc., for purposes of bringing together (in a catalog, for instance) all variants as they exist in the universe of published works. Now that we have learned just how mixed results from search engines can be, we seek to take control by developing and applying normative principles (e.g., “publication name”), an undertaking that will require a lot of resources over the long haul, as any library will tell you. But isn’t the absence of this overhead exactly what we have found so marvelous about Google and like search tools? There’s no need to be literal, no need to second guess the search engine’s algorithms, no need to craft weird Boolean queries, no need to ascertain the precise form of an author’s name… In any case, Mr. Ostrovsky’s suggestion makes another useful point: when performing a search–on the web, in… Read more »
Dear Roger, It’s rather clear by now you ‘don’t view the matter of page rank within Google to be an insignificant matter’–that’s the point of contention arising from your post. Precisely what public or publics are you referring to? I suspect it’s a rather ill-defined or insignificant one insofar as it helps or hinders a scholar’s career. I’ve yet to see any evidence that scholars were clearly harmed as a result of such ‘impressions.’ Certainly Chemerinsky himself seems by most criteria and most accounts to be flourishing in his scholarly profession (and deservedly so). What other scholars have lamented such page rankings as blocking or interfering with their upward professional trajectories? How could we even begin to seriously assess the veracity of such a complaint? I repeat, the public you are referencing here is not the one we need concern ourselves with: other ‘publics’ are far more reasonable in forming impressions of this or that scholar. And, when push comes to shove, even these publics may have little lasting impact on the reputation of academics, at least in comparison with the influence those academics have had on their students, the paper trail they’ve left behind, and/or their contributions to the… Read more »
Mr. Rowan,
It seems to me that the difference in the digital world in terms of developing normative principles of searching is that, in the digital world, this responsibility may fall more on the author. For the past few years, I have been conscious of this issue and have deliberately posted on blogs, etc. as “Aaron Ostrovsky” but published as “Aaron A. Ostrovsky.”
The difference in Google results between these two names is significant: searching the first name results in many blog comments as well as a link to my own blog about backcountry skiing (something I don’t necessarily want readers of my scholarly work finding before my papers). Searching the second name results in the first four hits being papers I have authored. Like I said, I believe the difference is due to my own diligence and could serve as an example for other authors concerned about this problem.
Mr. Ostrovsky, Point well taken. Your suggestion is intended to address a fairly well defined community of authors–legal scholars, say–who might be able to ameliorate the problem pointed out by Prof. Alford by taking a few simple steps. Given the magnitude of our online fund of “published” work, you are correct to recognize that no amount of manual intervention–for example, librarians confirming that Aaron Ostrovsky is the same as Aaron A. Ostrovsky and creating cross-references for future searchers–is going to scratch the surface of the landfill of variant names and titles on the web. My comment was slightly tangential to Prof. Alford’s and yours, but nevertheless relevant (I hope) to the related theme of control of access to useful stuff, and I think there’s more to be said along these lines, prompted by your recent remarks. First, if I read you correctly, you are advising scholars to maintain their own distinct name-identities among blog postings, working papers, hobby sites, and so forth. For the time being, the level of diligence required may be tolerable, but I can imagine the effort growing impractical pretty quickly. Second, Prof. Alford is concerned about how individual scholars perceive the depictions of their own careers… Read more »