An interesting question is how Google's approach will continue to perform in the future compared to social search engines such as Twitter and Facebook (and now also Google and Microsoft Bing) that are developing. They look at what people tell each other (without creating web links, which Google looks at). Various experts use their social network of other experts and colleagues to filter relevant news and say that they get better answers to their questions with this than when they search via Google. That is one of the reasons why Google also wants to become 'more social'. If you get a complicated esoteric question on Weekend Miljonairs, you would rather ask your eccentric uncle from Biddinghuizen than the audience. You would rather ask them about that one (popular) film with all that blood and Uma Thurman.
What next?
Does this definitively expose the 'wisdom of crowds' as a fable? china phone number list To some extent, yes, certainly when it comes to finding absolute answers to factual questions to which you do not know the answers. But certainly not if you see the wisdom of crowds as a way to make virtually inaccessible information from the web manageable, or if you want to have an estimate of something you knew nothing about. And if you see 'wisdom of crowds' as a way to make much more use of the knowledge and expertise that is present in our society, among ordinary people, and which we can now finally use much better thanks to the web. By developing algorithms to search information and predict stock prices, we are learning increasingly better how to make clever and sensible use of the wisdom of crowds.
the cow teaches us above all that the 'wisdom of a group' is not simple: think of the right composition of the group (crowd), the value of experts and lateral thinkers, the fact that knowledge often cannot be added up, but that it requires continuous discussion, debate, dialogue and occasionally even struggle. That is what our society and our science are built on. Realizing that the cow is a nice anecdote, that is wisdom.