Wanted: Flexibility

Google, Wisconsin, and Distributional Coalitions, Big Government, March 25, 2011. "Over the past month, Google made waves with the announcement that it has tweaked its search algorithms to penalize ‘content farms.’ These are “low quality sites whose main goal is to attract search traffic by piling up (mostly) useless content.” The lesson from Google is simple: no system devised by the mind of man is immune to being gamed by other men. Google’s merit is that it can respond quickly to thwart the gaming. That will, in turn, breed more gaming, but Google will, if it is attentive, not fall too far behind. If it slacks off, it will quickly be overtaken by a more nimble rival. The same, unfortunately, is not true of society as a whole."