Shoshana looked again at Marcuse. As much as she was intimidated by him, she also admired the man: he had stuck to his guns for four decades now, and this interaction might finally get him the vindication he deserved.
Having Hobo and Virgil chat was an idea that had grown out of the stillborn ApeNet project, founded in 2003 by British musician Peter Gabriel and American philanthropist Steve Woodruff. ApeNet had hoped to link Washoe, Kanzi, Koko, and Chantek, who represented four different kinds of great apes — common chimpanzee, bonobo chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan — in video conferences over the Internet. But ApeNet’s president, Lyn Miles, lost custody of Chantek, the orang she had enculturated in her home, and then Washoe the chimp died. Politics and funding prevented the project from ever getting off the ground.
Enter Harl Marcuse, who had rescued Hobo from the Georgia Zoo and had found enough private-sector benefactors to keep his project alive despite the ridicule, which, as he said, was nothing new. Noam Chomsky had pooh-poohed ape-language studies from the start. And in 1979, Herbert Terrace, who had worked with an ape he’d mockingly named Nim Chimpsky, had turned around and published a damning report that said although Nim had learned 125 signs, he couldn’t use them sequentially and had no grasp of grammar. And in his bestseller The Language Instinct, Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who had become a media darling, filling the void left by the deaths of Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, trashed studies that showed apes could manage sophisticated communication.
Shoshana had lost count of the number of times she’d been told that pursuing ape-language research would be career suicide, but, damn it all, at moments like this — two apes talking over the Web! — she didn’t regret her choice at all. They were making history here. Take that, Steven Pinker!
Chapter 16
It was now way past Caitlin’s bedtime, but — hot damn! — she was seeing the Web!
Her mother and father stayed with her, and she kept downloading the new software over and over again into her implant in order to keep the Web connection open. Her father was (so her mom had told her) a good artist, and Caitlin was describing what she saw for him so he could draw it. Of course, she couldn’t see the drawings, so none of them knew if he was getting it right but, still, it was important to have some sort of record, and—
The phone rang. Caitlin had the caller ID hooked up through her computer, and it announced, “Long Distance, Unknown Caller.”
She hit the speakerphone button and said, “Hello.”
“Miss Caitlin,” wheezed the familiar voice.
“Dr. Kuroda, hi!”
“I have an idea,” he said. “Do you know about Jagster?”
“Sure,” said Caitlin.
“What’s that?” asked her mom.
“It’s an open-source search-engine — a competitor for Google,” said Kuroda. “And I think it may be of use to us.”
Caitlin swiveled in her chair to face her computer and typed “jagster” into Google; not surprisingly, the first hit wasn’t Jagster itself — no need for Coke to redirect customers to Pepsi! — but rather an encyclopedia entry about it. She brought the article up on screen so her mother could read it.
From the Online Encyclopedia of Computing: GOOGLE IS THE de facto PORTAL TO THE WEB, AND MANY PEOPLE FEEL THAT A FOR-PROFIT CORPORATION SHOULDN’T HOLD THAT ROLE — ESPECIALLY ONE THAT IS SECRETIVE ABOUT HOW IT RANKS SEARCH RESULTS. THE FIRST ATTEMPT TO PRODUCE AN OPEN-SOURCE, ACCOUNTABLE ALTERNATIVE WAS WIKIA SEARCH, DEVISED BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO HAD PUT TOGETHER WIKIPEDIA. HOWEVER, BY FAR THE MOST SUCCESSFUL SUCH PROJECT TO DATE IS JAGSTER.
THE PROBLEM IS NOT WITH GOOGLE’S THOROUGHNESS, BUT RATHER WITH HOW IT CHOOSES WHICH LISTINGS TO PUT FIRST. GOOGLE’S PRINCIPAL ALGORITHM, AT LEAST INITIALLY, WAS CALLED PAGERANK — A JOKEY NAME BECAUSE NOT ONLY DID IT RANK PAGES BUT IT HAD BEEN DEVELOPED BY LARRY PAGE, ONE OF GOOGLE’S TWO FOUNDERS. PAGERANK LOOKED TO SEE HOW MANY OTHER PAGES LINKED TO A GIVEN PAGE, AND TOOK THAT AS THE ULTIMATE DEMOCRATIC CHOICE, GIVING TOP POSITIONING TO THOSE THAT WERE LINKED TO THE MOST.
SINCE THE VAST MAJORITY OF GOOGLE USERS LOOK AT ONLY THE TEN LISTINGS PROVIDED ON THE FIRST PAGE OF RESULTS, GETTING INTO THE TOP TEN IS CRUCIAL FOR A BUSINESS, AND BEING NUMBER ONE IS GOLD — AND SO PEOPLE STARTED TRYING TO FOOL GOOGLE. CREATING OTHER SITES THAT DID LITTLE MORE THAN LINK BACK TO YOUR OWN SITE WAS ONE OF SEVERAL WAYS TO FOOL PAGERANK. IN RESPONSE, GOOGLE DEVELOPED NEW METHODS FOR ASSIGNING RANKINGS TO PAGES. AND DESPITE THE COMPANY’S MOTTO — “DON’T BE EVIL” — PEOPLE COULDN’T HELP BUT QUESTION JUST WHAT DETERMINEDWHO NOW GOT THE TOP SPOTS, ESPECIALLY WHEN THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING NUMBERTEN AND NUMBER ELEVEN MIGHT BE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN ONLINE SALES.
BUT GOOGLE REFUSED TO DIVULGE ITS NEW METHODS, AND THAT GAVE RISE TO PROJECTS TO DEVELOP FREE, OPEN-SOURCE, TRANSPARENT ALTERNATIVES TO GOOGLE: “FREE” MEANING THAT THERE WOULD BE NO WAY TO BUY A TOP LISTING (ON GOOGLE, YOU CAN BELISTED FIRST BY PAYING TO BE A “SPONSORED LINK”); “OPEN SOURCE” MEANING ANYONE COULD LOOK AT THE ACTUAL CODE BEING USED AND MODIFY IT IF THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD A FAIRER OR MORE EFFICIENT APPROACH; AND “TRANSPARENT” MEANING THE WHOLE PROCESS COULD BE MONITORED AND UNDERSTOOD BY ANYONE.
WHAT MAKES JAGSTER DIFFERENT FROM OTHER OPEN-SOURCE SEARCH ENGINES IS JUST how TRANSPARENT IT IS. ALL SEARCH ENGINES USE SPECIAL SOFTWARE CALLED WEB SPIDERS TO SCOOT ALONG, JUMPING FROM ONE SITE TO ANOTHER, MAPPING OUT CONNECTIONS. THAT’S NORMALLY CONSIDERED DREARY UNDER-THE-HOOD STUFF, BUT JAGSTER MAKES THIS RAW DATABASE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE AND CONSTANTLY UPDATES IT IN REAL-TIME AS ITS SPIDERS DISCOVER NEWLY ADDED, DELETED, OR CHANGED PAGES.IN THE TRADITION OF SILLY WEB ACRONYMS (“YAHOO!” STANDS FOR “YET ANOTHER HIERARCHICAL OFFICIOUS ORACLE”), JAGSTER IS SHORT FOR “JUDICIOUSLY ARRANGEDGLOBAL SEARCH-TERM EVALUATIVE RANKER” — AND THE BATTLE BETWEEN GOOGLE AND JAGSTER HAS BEEN DUBBED THE “RANKER RANCOR” BY THE PRESS…
Caitlin and her parents were still on the phone with Dr. Kuroda in Tokyo.
“I’ve got a conference call going here,” Kuroda said. “Also on the line is a friend of mine at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. She’s part of the Internet Cartography Project. They use data from Jagster to keep track moment by moment of the topology of the Web — its constantly changing shape and construction. Dr. Decter, Mrs. Decter, and Miss Caitlin, please say hello to Professor Anna Bloom.”
Caitlin felt a bit miffed on behalf of her mom — she was Dr. Decter, too, after all, even if she hadn’t had a university appointment since Bill Clinton was president. But there was nothing in her mother’s voice to indicate she felt slighted. “Hello, Anna.”
Caitlin said, “Hello,” too; her father said nothing.
“Hello, everyone,” Anna said. “Caitlin, what we want to do is keep the link between your post-retinal implant and the Web open, but instead of just going back and forth downloading and redownloading the same piece of software from Masayuki’s site, we want to plug you directly into the datastream from Jagster.”
“What if it overloads her brain?” said Caitlin’s mom, her tone conveying that she couldn’t believe she was uttering such a sentence.
“I rather doubt that’s possible from what I’ve heard about Caitlin’s brain,”
Anna said warmly. “But, still, you should have your cursor on the ‘abort’ button. If you don’t like what’s happening, you can cut the connection.”
“We shouldn’t be messing around like this,” her mom said.
“Barbara, I do need to try things if I’m going to help Miss Caitlin see the real world,” Kuroda said. “I need to see how she reacts to different sorts of input.”