The Googlization of Everything. Siva Vaidhyanathan
and, more important, “sex.” As Lewis wrote,
What Google does do, however, is to come up with a list that starts with a guide to marriage and sex, not the long string of pornographic sites that would pop up in the search listings of most other engines. Many disreputable Web site operators attempt to fool search engines by salting their pages with bogus key words in an attempt to lure unsuspecting users. Google does not ogle. Instead, Google determines the relevance or importance of a page in part by measuring how many other sites have links to it. That technique enables Google to rank even those sites that it has not visited. Many Web sites do not allow search engines to catalogue their content, but they may hold the information a searcher wants.
Unlike other search engines, Lewis wrote, “Google … takes into account the importance, measured in popularity, of the sites that are linking to the page. Links from popular sites are given more weight than links from obscure sites. If a lot of important sites establish links with the page, the reasoning goes, it must be important too. It is the cyber-age variant on the common wisdom that the best roadside diners are the ones with all the big trucks parked outside.” Once the New York Times parked its truck outside Google and explained the virtues of PageRank to the elites of America, it was impossible to stop Google’s proliferation.12
Still, through its early years of rapid growth, Google never advertised on television or in standard print media (although it did purchase a gratuitous, albeit clever, advertisement during the Super Bowl in 2010). Its growth in popularity was in part sparked by glowing reviews among technology writers, but the most significant factor in its growth was word-of-mouth recommendation. Most of us discovered Google because it worked for our friends. It took a mess and put it in order. It took a frustrating task and made it simple. And it seemed so unassuming about the whole matter.
This is a story of commercial success rarely seen in business history. The business was all about leveraging technology and science. Those, after all, were what lay behind Google’s mission, however humanistic its statement might be: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The larger question that we need to ponder, however, is why we all welcomed such an enterprise with open arms and why we have unreflectively trusted it with such massive amounts of our personal information and with control over our access to knowledge.
“TRUST BIAS” AND THE PRAGMATISM OF PAGERANK
Questions of trust and control are not merely matters of abstract speculation. The core practices of Google—the massive accumulation of data on consumer and citizen preferences, the ability to accurately and precisely target small advertisements for small services for a small fee billions of times per day, and the appearance of offering access to information for no monetary cost—could soon be dominant modes of information commerce.13 Google has already forced big media companies and mobile-phone services to alter their expectations and services. Soon other companies will no doubt try to mimic Google’s style, philosophy, and moves.14
We trust Google with our personal information and preferences and with our access to knowledge because we trust technology that satisfies our prejudices. We want fast access to relevant and reliable information. Google has ascended to great heights in twelve short years by emphasizing three characteristics of its technology that build trust among users: speed, “precise comprehensiveness,” and honesty. On one level—that of simple practicality—we trust Google because, compared with the alternatives, it indeed works fast, produces information that usually seems relevant, and, as a result, seems trustworthy.
Precise comprehensiveness is the term I give to the list of results that appears to be clear and ranked in order of relevance. If a number of users doing the same search click on the third result instead of the first, then, over time, Google will raise the rank of that result. Google Web Search presents us with a linear pattern of display—the ordered list—that offers a sense of precision. The impression of comprehensiveness derives from the declarations of (largely useless) abundance that Google offers along the top of each search results page, such as “Results 1–10 of about 481,000,000 for God.” The sense of precision derives from the short list of ten results returned on the first page.
Users thus believe that Google’s rankings are honest expressions of probable importance and relevance. They demonstrate a “trust bias” when selecting one of these links to click: they inherently trust Google’s algorithmic judgment about which links are appropriate for them.15 This trust bias is reinforced by the fact that most people who use Google do so in a very unsophisticated way while nonetheless expressing a high level of confidence about their own skills at navigating a search system.16
Whether or not users know the company’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” this trust bias reflects a faith, avowed or latent, in Google’s corporate ethos. I examine this faith at greater length in the next chapter. Users believe in Google’s honesty regardless of whether they understand the way its core algorithm, PageRank, chooses what to display and how to rank links. Users trust Google to make choices for them, or at least to guide them toward a few choices that attract the most attention.17 Needless to say, appearing on the first page of results is of paramount importance for firms competing for attention and sales.18
Despite a shallow understanding of how search engines work, Web users express deep satisfaction with them. Only 19 percent express a lack of trust in search engines. More than 68 percent of Web search users report that they consider search engines to be fair and unbiased. About 44 percent of those surveyed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2005 said they use only one search engine, and 48 percent use only two or three. Only 38 percent said they were aware of the distinction between the sponsored advertising links that Google and other search services offer and the algorithmically generated “organic” results that dominate the page. Only one in six search users could testify that they can always tell the difference between the sponsored links and the generated results.19
Thus Google is inherently conservative in its effects on the information world: winners keep winning, unless Google changes the rules of the system or intervenes with human judgment.20 By favoring the majority or the consensus among search sites, Google Web Search results also favor the comfortable middle ground of controversial subjects.21
THE PRAGMATIC THEORY OF SEARCH
Our trust in Google is pragmatic in more than just the ordinary sense of the term, however. We believe that a consensus about what’s important, arrived at by apparently democratic means, is probably trustworthy. Google’s method of relying on the collective and active judgment of millions of Web users seems in the abstract to realize one of the most influential theories of epistemology: American pragmatism. As Charles Sanders Peirce and William James developed it in the 1890s and Richard Rorty refined it almost century later, the pragmatic theory of truth states that truth is generated through a process of experimentation, discovery, feedback, and consensus.22 The true statement is therefore one that works in the world, James would say. It conforms to experience and observation, yet is under constant pressure of revision, as Peirce explained.23 Truth is not attached to a thing in the world per se, but to our experiences of that thing and to our conversation about and collective understanding of it. People and peoples can disagree over what is true, and that disagreement is a part of the process of lurching toward truth.
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