Quote:
Originally Posted by MartinParish
To see why, let's think a moment here about other kinds of content on the Internet. I'd be prepared to bet that any time you do a search on Google, well over 90% of the hits you retrieve are worthless. Even if they weren't, how would you ever find time to read through all of them? So clearly the junk to gems ratio on the Internet is extremely high - and yet no one wants or needs Internet gatekeepers, because we can decide what links we follow for ourselves. The same is true for books. Ultimately, the free market is perfectly able to decide what is and is not a good book without a gatekeeper to make that decision for us.
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Google acts as a gatekeeper via its ranking system, as do all the search engines. It is just a different type of gatekeeping. Google tells us that the most relevant hits are likely to be in the first page or 2 of returns. How is that not gatekeeping?