The Googlization of Everything. Siva Vaidhyanathan
We all Google our various gods, no matter what we worship or how worthy those gods are of our devotion. And now we expect nothing less than a meaningful response. Google’s success is a function of our collective cultural weaknesses, and it in turn encourages them by ratcheting up our expectations.
As Google vice president Marissa Mayer explained during her 2008 keynote speech at a software developers’ conference, one of the most significant things that Google discovered in its early user studies was that speed mattered more than anything else in generating a “positive user experience.” This fact has driven Google to push the Internet industry for faster broadband service, create faster-running Web applications, and invest in an expensive, complicated, and powerful infrastructure to conduct Google’s core activity: copying and searching the World Wide Web. “Users really care about speed,” Mayer told developers. “They respond to speed. As the web gets faster, as Google gets faster, people search more.”3 More searching yields more advertising links displayed, more advertising links clicked, and more revenue for Google’s advertising clients and Google itself. Users clearly reward the speed and the quality of search results.
Under the hood, Google runs an astounding set of machines and brilliant code. Mayer explained that every time someone types a simple query into the empty search box on the blank Google home page, that query fires up between 700 and 1,000 separate computers in several huge data centers around the United States. These computers generate 5 million search results by scanning indexes and previous search queries in a mere .16 seconds.4
To Google users, this amazing process is invisible. Making users wise to its power is not a priority of the company: quite the opposite. “It’s very, very complicated technology, but behind a very simple interface,” Mayer said. “We think that that’s the best way to do things. Our users don’t need to understand how complicated the technology and the development work that happens behind this is. What they do need to understand is that they can just go to a box, type what they want, and get answers.”5
If Google users were to understand or appreciate the scale and complexity of Google’s operation, their expectations for magical results might be tempered, their appreciation for human work and ingenuity bolstered, and their abilities to use the tools enhanced. Such changes would not benefit Google now, as it has bet the future of the company on being bigger, faster, better, and more embedded in the constant collective consciousness of human beings than any commercial firm in history. And by promoting its operations as almost magical, Google is not doing anything wrong. Its apparent omnipresence and omnipotence are merely functions of its abilities to capitalize on our weaknesses and desires, cravings, and curiosities.
Faith in Google is dangerous because it increases our appetite for goods, services, information, amusement, distraction, and efficiency. We are addicted to speed and convenience for the sake of speed and convenience. Google rewards us for our desires for immediate gratification at no apparent cost to us. There is nothing wrong with immediate gratification per se; it’s certainly better than no gratification. Immediacy should not, however, be an end in itself. And providing immediate gratification draped in a cloak of corporate benevolence is bad faith.
THE TECHNO-FUNDAMENTALIST ESCHATOLOGY
Google spreads an eschatological ideology: a belief in fulfillment of prophecy. Those who profess eschatologies are uninterested in origin stories or accounts of miracles: instead, they look ahead. Eschatology is the study of the ultimate destiny of humanity. For Google, that destiny involves the organization and universal accessibility of the world’s information. The road to that destiny is paved with the ideal expressions of techno-fundamentalism. Google believes that the constant application of advanced information technologies—algorithms, computer code, high-speed networks, and massively powerful servers—will solve many, if not all, human problems.
No firm operates independently of the culture in which it operates. Industry does not drive history any more than history drives industry. To grasp the full significance of a particular firm or institution, we must consider its place in culture and society—the work it does and the beliefs that value and enable that work. Google is both a product of early twenty-first-century American culture and an influence on global culture.
LIFE BEFORE GOOGLE
Google may be sui generis, but before Google, a number of search engines competed for business in the field. Each of them conducted indexing and searching a bit differently. Like Google, they all originated from a rich academic field devoted to information coding and retrieval, one that lies at the intersection of computer science, linguistics, and library and information studies. It remains an exciting intellectual field. But the late-1990s market gurus of Silicon Valley did not necessarily see search as the key to riches. They saw it as an ancillary feature designed to hold customers’ attention, along with all the other services and content that crowded pages such as Yahoo and Excite.6 Early news coverage of Google generally folded the company in with other search companies launched around the same time. Rarely did a technology or business journalist declare that there was anything remarkable or distinct about Google, even though the simple act of using it demonstrated Google’s superiority almost instantly.
Business Week first took note of Google in September 1998. In a brief entry about how search engines work and the challenge of assessing the quality of their results, its editors wrote: “There’s another ranking system that may be even better for managers. Google (http://google.stanford.edu/) rates Web sites by the number of other sites linked to them. The rankings, in other words, are determined not by surfers, but by Webmasters who presumably took time to evaluate a site before setting up a link to it. It’s an adaptation of the time-honored practice of assessing scientific papers by the number of citations they’ve gotten in other papers.”7
It’s notable that the link to Google given in that article was within the Stanford University computer system. This is the earliest reference I could find to the search engine that ten years later would dominate the Web experience in most of the world. The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand, mentioned Google as a new idea for Web search in December 1998. By then, the URL already stood alone as www.google.com.8 USA Today also listed Google in a brief about interesting websites in December 1998.9 Business and computer publications with specialized circulations started mentioning Google in mid-1999. The New York Times apparently did not consider Google important enough to write about until its columnist Max Frankel mentioned Google among a list of search engines in November 1999.10
The first serious consideration of Google by the New York Times, the leading American newspaper, was a de facto endorsement by the technology writer Peter Lewis in September 1999. “Until recently my favorite search engines were Hotbot (www.hotbot.com) and Alta Vista (www.altavista.com),” Lewis wrote. “Hotbot is useful for finding popular Web sites, and AltaVista is good at ferreting out obscure information. Alta Vista in particular returns a bazillion potential hits when it is asked to scour the Net for a word or phrase. But the larger the World Wide Web becomes, the more important it becomes for search engines to return fewer results, not more. Few people have time to click through 70,482 query matches hoping that the one they want, the most relevant one, is in there somewhere. The engines not only have to be smarter, but also faster.” Lewis noted that “several search engines introduced recently deserve serious consideration, including the revamped version of MSN.com Search (msn.com), introduced by the Microsoft Network last week, and AOL.com Search (aol.com), to be introduced by America Online next week. But if you are searching for the next generation in search technologies, look for Gurunet and Google.”11
Gurunet did not last long after Lewis wrote about it, and he offered only qualified interest in its methods. He was smitten with Google, however. At the moment when the president of the United States was enmeshed in a tawdry scandal involving