Andrew Orlowski
| Andrew Orlowski | |
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Orlowski in 2006
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| Born | 1966 (age 50–51) |
| Occupation | Executive editor for IT news and opinion website The Register |
| Website | andreworlowski |
Andrew Orlowski (born 1966) is a British columnist, an investigative journalist and the executive editor of the IT news and opinion website The Register.
In his youth, Orlowski had been involved in a school magazine called Within These Walls, and a fanzine named Paradise Demise. Moving from Northallerton, Yorkshire, to Manchester in 1984, he studied at University of Manchester and then took a course in computer programming. He worked as a programmer in Altrincham in the early 1990s, and later said that he "found that a lot less creative than I'd expected, and this being my first proper job I soon got disillusioned."
Orlowski wrote reviews for Manchester's City Life magazine from 1988, and in 1992 started an alternative newspaper called Badpress in Manchester. In 1994 he became computer correspondent at Private Eye magazine. In the late 1990s, he wrote for PC Pro and was news editor at IT Week. Today, Orlowski is a columnist and the executive editor of IT news and opinion website The Register; he was based in San Francisco for five years in the early 2000s, reporting for The Register, but returned to England in 2006.
In 2003, Orlowski coined the term googlewashing to describe the potential for accidental or intentional censorship of concepts through the way search engines like Google Search operate. An article in The New York Times commenting on worldwide anti-war demonstrations had stated that "there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion", and the term "the Second Superpower" suddenly acquired widespread currency. However, within a few weeks, most of the top search engine results for the term had come to be about something else, because a prominent blogger had used the same term in what Orlowski described as a "plea for net users to organize themselves as a 'superpower'." The blogger's piece was so well linked and so widely commented upon online that the first few pages of Google hits in a search for "the second superpower" all were about his new meaning, with the original anti-war meaning relegated to "other links not shown because they are deemed to be irrelevant." Even the term googlewashing itself almost came to be "googlewashed" in a similar manner, with Orlowski's original definition temporarily disappearing from the top Google search results for the term.
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