Organising information

In the 1860s, as the legend goes, President Mariano Melgarejo of Bolivia became extremely fed up with the British Ambassador to La Paz. There are various versions of the tale, some including a mistress and her bottom, but the end result was that the diplomat was trussed backwards on a donkey and led around the city's main square in humiliation.

He returned to London to complain, whereupon Queen Victoria asked her Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, where Bolivia was and was it available for bombardment from the sea. Informed that it was not, she is said to have taken a pen and angrily scratched the country from her map and ordered new British maps not to show the place at all.

Imperial hubris is one thing and Google is another, but the world's largest search engine has just made an interesting use of its editorial power by producing an annotated map of the genocide in Darfur.

Google Earth has teamed up with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington to offer a detailed guide to the western region of Sudan, where more than 200,000 people have been killed and more than 2 million have abandoned their homes to escape a wave of ethnic violence and rape inflicted by roaming Arab militias known as the janjaweed since 2003.

You must download Google Earth and the accompanying extras before you can zoom down to the level where 1,600 burned villages and several refugee camps are visible. Tags and photographs explain the damage, human cost and struggles of the humanitarian effort to protect refugees from the militias and their government sponsors.

“When it comes to responding to genocide, the world’s record is terrible. We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most,” said Sara Bloomfield, the Holocaust Museum's director when she launched the collaboration yesterday.

Google has never hidden its moral intentions. Underpinning its general mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", there has always been a calling to higher things. In its 2004 IPO prospectus, the company issued the slogan: "DON'T BE EVIL"

"We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served — as shareholders and in all other ways — by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains," the document said, adding: "Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others."

So far those "many others" have not included the political. There have been brushes, for instance, in the form of the unpopular decision to replace its Google Maps of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina with higher-quality images from before the disaster. And those who search for them have also been amused by things like the odd, magnificently detailed shot of the last known location of Osama bin Laden and downtown Basra. (Compare Google's interest in Brighton, for instance).

Perhaps the Darfur initiative, wholly worthy that it is, marks the beginning of a new direction for Google. In the future, will we await the company's reaction to other humanitarian disasters and conflicts? Will educating the 200 million users of Google Earth about Darfur help bring about change? Could Google stop a war?

A less quoted line in its 2004 prospectus acknowledges that Google's mixture of free searches and paid-for advertising resembles the older form of information-organising devices, "a well-run newspaper", and, try as the press might, we know they have always struggled to hide their editorial leanings.

Organising information means showing it one way and not another. It's not Google's fault that it's the world's most popular search engine and we all rely on it to see the world everyday. But take our advice, don't get on their bad side. No one is in a better position to delete Bolivia.

Comments

[Ian Thorpe]

Fear not, as a former IT consultant I get the feeling divine payback for Google's hubris in disorganising information and making so many addicted to randomness is not far away

[Sage]

Couldn't disagree more. What has made Google successful is that it has been neutral. Now it has changed this model and is becoming "politically correct" - which means, advancing the political agenda of the "Establishment". There is no consensus about what is happening and why in the Sudan. Obviously this article blames the "Arab hordes", but, funny, it's always the damn Arabs to blame, isn't it?