Do you google?

I confess that whilst watching the lame third series of 24, when I heard Tony Almeida instruct his minions to “find out everything you can about [someone]” and they all got to work on their terminals, I imagined them all entering the name into Google at once.

Eszter, why does the “proprietary” nature of Google make it problematic to have so much riding on it? (This point seems to contradict your argument that so much isn’t riding on it, but I’m more convinced that Google is shaping people’s perception of the Web, so the second concern is more interesting to me.) The implication seems to be that if Google were publicly run or a non-profit, that its omnipotence, as it were, would be less problematic. But I don’t see the logic here. A public service would be run by people with particular interests as well. It would be just as subject to manipulation. It would be as tempting — actually, I think even more tempting — to use it for the purposes of censorship (look at the experience of Net users in China or many Arab countries). And it would be free of the competitive pressures that in effect keep Google honest — if Google stops delivering good results (and any remotely savvy user would be able to tell if it did), it will stop attracting users.

The problem, in other words, doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with whether Google is a for-profit entity or not. It’s whether Google is the single player in the space or not, and whether it has competition that will keep it honest.

Steve, thanks for the thoughtful comments. By that logic are you suggeting that M$ is an honest company with great products b/c competition is keeping it that way?;-)

When I say so much is riding on Google, I refer to the fact that many people who develop systems and who influence the uses of others think it’s the only service. Its market share has certainly grown over the years and may keep growing. It is certainly the case that millions are using Google, but many of those users aren’t savvy enough to know to check (or know how to check) whether Google is being biased in some ways.

The problem about being proprietary is that so far it has meant that there is no transparency. You don’t have to go to China to find examples of censorship. Google has done such things itself. See some examples and references on p.11. of the paper I referred to in my post.

I agree with you that an important issue is continued competition. Some transparency in the system would help as well.. although I realize even if Google were to list somewhere on its site content it censors, many people likely wouldn’t know about it regardless.

An interesting alternative would be an open-source search engine and there are some initiatives around this. I realize there is no easy solution and there are reasons to have private entities providing such services, but I think it is a topic worthy of discussion. I certainly appreciate your comments.

I’d certainly agree that a lot is riding on Google. But I think arthegall’s point is a good one –a few years ago, people assumed that Yahoo’s position was unassailable, only to learn differently. One of the reasons why I’m not as concerned about Google manipulating its results as you are is that I think the consequences of that manipulation would be quick and painful for the company. Without fetishizing the flow of information on the Web, I think we can see that the barriers to entry are much lower there, and the ease with which people can move to competitive alternatives is much greater. The only thing that Google has going for it is the reliability of its results (I am a firm disbeliever in the power of brand names absent substantive benefits). I think competitive pressure is, in this case, will militate against non-manipulation. And while there are isolated examples of Google censoring, those were — as you mention — almost all in response to legal pressure (that is, the threat of state sanction). I’ve yet to see any convincing evidence that we should worry about Google’s profit-seeking leading to it distorting outcomes. And, as I said, I don’t think there’s anything that makes a for-profit entity more likely to manipulate than a public one.

Having said that, I’d be all in favor of an open-source search engine. But we should acknowledge that even open-source programs like Linux have their own organizational issues to deal with. Effectively speaking, a small number of people make the important decisions about what gets incorporated into Linux’s kernel and what doesn’t. I don’t think it has to be that way, but open-source is not a panacea when it comes to questions of power and influence.

Firstly, the online world moves at a fast pace: Google may be the dominant force now, but in five years time, it’s unlikely. I think other search engines have their own followers, and, especially when linked with portals (Yahoo! has just dropped Google, I believe) there are still markets which Google hasn’t won, or could easily lose. Effectively, in many cases, its dominance has come through franchise.

Secondly, the pace of progress means that Google – or any other proprietry brand – has to keep up or lose its dominant position. It might be the best *now*, but it has to maintain that position. (That said, brands which become synonymous with the market do gain an advantage).

Thirdly, this is often a localised phenomenon. I don’t know many British people who use “xeroxing” or “kleenex” in place of ‘photocopy’ or ’tissue’. Similarly, I think it’s only high-volume web users who use “google” to mean “internet search” (although there are a lot of high-volume web users).

But googlin’ is synonymous with online searching.

I don’t see any problem with that. Even after reading your article.

Most people don’t use kleenex branded kleenexes or xerox on xerox machines. These names have stuck because at a certain moment the brand became synonymous with the product. This has now happened with google.

And just as anyone can make a kleenex or a xerox machine, anyone can make a internet search engine.
At the time Google started it was new technology, it was a new way of presenting a search engine. And Google almost single handedly invented the way in wich to commercialize it, without distracting the user too much.

But now anyone with a few billion $’s to spare can create a search engine of comparable quality.

Does Google have a monopoly? Yes, it dominates the market of independent search engines. But as far as I know it does not hinder its competitors.
And as you note, the available statistics never rank Google way above its “competitors”.

References to Google as the be-all and end-all of search engines abound at least among journalists and academics, and perhaps it is not surprising that such people know about and use Google. But not everybody does although you’d be hard-pressed to know that judging from the rhetoric.

Everyone that uses and compares search engines, and is in some way dependent on the results, uses Google. Joe Average may not, but then maybe Joe isn’t that demanding. And thus Joe’s opinion about search engines doesn’t hold much value.
So there CAN be no other rhetoric than that Google is the be-all and end-all of general internet searches.

At least until there’s finally a competitor that beats Google at its own game.

We do not know where it is headed and since the details of its algorithm for displaying results are not transparent to the public we should not depend on it to guarantee equal access to all types of information indefinitely.

That’s true, but is it a problem? I don’t expect that from a search engine. What I want is that a search engine helps me find information on the Internet. There’s a whole industry of small companies trying to stack the odds in getting pages listed in the top 10 of a google query.
Hardly a sign of ‘transparancy’ and ‘equal access’. Yet at the same time I consider this part of the charm of the Internet industry.

I don’t know if those that expect transparancy are the same people that are surprised when you tell them that any ordinary email can be faked.
It still is necessary to know the technology to get a proper view of what to expect from internet services and companies.

The internet delivers what it can. There is competition so if it could be better it will get better in time. But as long as people like me (and many others) prefer their services free, the quality will be accordingly.

Google is probably the most popular, although it is very hard to collect accurate statistics for this stuff.

From Silicon Valley Business Journal:

The top five search engines in January were Google, with 59.3 million unique visitors; Yahoo Search, with 45.8 million; MSN Search, 44.6 million; AOL Search, 23.4 million; and Ask Jeeves, 12.8 million.

Neil, the US figures from that report suggest 39% reach for Google.

[Tangential Google rant:]

“…since the details of its algorithm for displaying results are not transparent to the public…”

to say nothing of the details of its algorithm for crawling – pages that have been online all the time seem to appear and disappear from its database with appalling frequency.

At the same time, content that is NOT accessible to the [unregistered] reader is displayed prominently.

Not ideal.

Unfortunately, an open-source search engine comparable to Google is a non-starter. Apart from the cost of the infrastructure, search engines have to keep the details of their algorithms secret in order to make it more difficult for unscrupulous web site owners to manipulate the system for higher ranking. Although Google’s Page Rank algorithm is well-publicized, Page Rank is only one of over 100 different factors that Google looks at when ordering the results of a query. There is a large industry, and a lot of intelligent people with considerable resources who devote themselves to trying to manipulate search engine positioning. These techniques range from the completely innocent (providing accurate summaries for each page) to the downright deceptive (e.g. “cloaking”, providing different content to search engine spiders than to actual users, or “link farms”, completely spurious interlinked sites created just to boost search engine ranking.) (If you’ve ever run across strange pages in your Google results, pages filled with seemingly nonsensical or repetitious content and links, those are sites designed solely to influence search engine ranking.) The technical sophistication of some of these operations is remarkable. There is an arms race between search engines and “optimizers” and a publicly-disclosed algorithm would simply give away the game, to the detriment of the end user.

I used all the early search engines while working as a reference librarian and was happy indeed to dump them for Google. I use it constantly and so do all my friends. And last night on West Wing, Toby’s secretary mentioned using Google.

MKK

Searcher – since this is what I study and I have conducted in-person observations with Internet users I can tell you that yes, the people who do not use search engines often find information by going to Web sites directly (although often these are just bad guesses for sites that lead to an error) or by clicking on various links on their default homepage. The AOL users I had in my study who did not use search engines tended to rely on the AOL Channels quite a bit.

neil,

The top five search engines in January were Google, with 59.3 million unique visitors; Yahoo Search, with 45.8 million…

You have to take into account the fact that Yahoo used Google for actual search results, until very recently. It remains to be seen whether the new Yahoo! Search can compete with Google (having tried it a few times, I think it’s very promising, being only somewhat worse than Google).

sigivald,

I wouldn’t worry. If people don’t like how Google is handling their searches, there is no barrier to entry for another service; the nature of the network is that anyone can map and (at least as well as Google does) cache it, given sufficient bandwidth, CPU, and storage space…

It’s not just a matter of throwing enough storage space at the problem. Google runs entirely from memory to achieve the response speeds that it does, and uses many smart algorithms not necessarily known publicly. Here are several interesting thoughts about how that may affect the barrier to entry.

I imagine similar concerns were raised back in the day about the Encyclopedia Britannica and the OED. The salient feature of the Internet age is that it’s far easier to start up a competing alternative. The notion of needing billions of dollars is misplaced; Sergey Brin and his partner were not billionaires when they crafted Google’s algorithms, just as Jerry Yang and his partner were not billionaires when they founded Yahoo. Millions of dollars found its way to them, just like millions of dollars found its way to Lycos and Excite. Some succeeded, and some didn’t, and there’s no reason to think that Google won’t be overtaken someday.

The fact that the word has entered the language seems as much a consequence of the ease with which “googling” trips off the tongue as anything else. Besides which, what is the consequence? No one speaks of “Electroluxing” a floor or “Canoning” a piece of paper, yet those companies and many others still produce plenty of vacuum cleaners and copiers.

I’m in library school and we use Google all the time, much to our professor’s chagrin. One of my professors has this obsession with Dialog which is an archaic batch search that uses a command line interface to access 400+ databases. The problem is, I can find the same information faster, easier and for free on Google. So as a soon-to-be reference librarian, which will I use to preform quereys for clients? The free fast search engine or the slow innacurate search portal that costs money?

A lot of academics like to badmouth Google I’ve noticed. That’s fine,one man’s opinion and all that. And if you can show me something that is better, faster and cheeper, I’ll use it. Until then, I’ll be googling.

Keith – I wasn’t badmouthing Google. I was showing concer for depending on non-transparent services too much. I was also pointing out that the majority of Web users don’t search on Google. This is interesting to those of us who study how people access content on the Web.. possibly of interest to a future librarian as well.

You have to forgive me, but what exactly is your point, either here or in that First Monday article?

martin, i will venture that the point eszter is making is one of raising consciousness about who has power – i.e., controls information. proprietary (non-transparent) code is one illustration of how information access is controlled, though it may be difficult to clearly understand who’s interests are being served.

many folks have commented upon the uproar that would ensue if search engines were to engineer bias, or sell listings. (a) how would we ever know? (and, isn’t there bias built into any system?); (b) as eszter points out, search engines do feature lisitngs that are paid placements. further, as her research points out, there are a whole lot of folks using the net who are not skilled users – this disparity in foundational knowledge, compounded with poor skills, solidifies social inequality. (c) it is a stretch to think that known corrupt systems (that favor extant power dynamics) will result in those systems changing, or being forced to change. a prime example of this going unreported and largely uncontested is diebold’s black box voting – i don’t see changes happening here, and this is our democracy getting hijacked!