Afraid of Google?

People respond to Google with awe, familiarity, suspicion and fear. How did it raise so fast to a position of such economic and cultural dominance? How could one work and play without it before? What’s it doing with al that data? Is big brother out to get us?

What I find troubling is how past searches affect new ones. How the aggregate of queries that we pose to the “don’t be evil” god, the ranking of results and the pick of our clicks, conditions what we will ask for in the future, and get in return. According to Google, to improve their services they do not only spell check search terms –hey, they do facilitate digital access to the literately challenged, and many more- but also review their logs to check if we end up clicking on their #1. Good for themselves if we do and bad if we don’t. One way search engines “improve” is by comparing a search to prior ones, and offering us first the results mostly clicked on before.

John Battalle coined the phrase “the database of intentions” to describe the accumulative memory of “every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result […] a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.” JB is interested in what this archive may tell about the human condition and present culture, and is concerned about the commercial and political abuse of this store of intentions.

There is an obvious step from search words to human intentions, a step that a cultural anthropologist come technorati as JB is willing to make, but what troubles me is how the Google Zeitgeist reinforces the path of less resistance, self satisfies mainstream culture with it’s mirror image, and hinders our encounter with the unexpected, the new, the essential. First, the best match between our real intentions and the search terms that we use to express them is deduced from the relation between these terms and a collective array of links between past searches and choices. Then, our new tech sped up culture promotes that we take the fastest and easiest route, not the best, not the necessary and certainly not the most enjoyable. A double whammy vicious cycle pushing popularity ad nauseam.

In the The Long Tail (see Post #1 below), Chris Anderson argues for the aggregate value of many niche markets versus just a few blockbusters, and the potential that this has for the circulation of alternative cultural products, points of view and ideas. There seems to be two counter forces at play here in the digital world, the viability of difference and the push for conformity. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

PS: As I was closing this post, I noticed Web History, a personalized Google experience ware. WB matches search terms and results by taking into account the history of our individual searches, the paths that we have taken, the clicks of our past whimsy. Who we are we will be.