Whose Search Is It Anyway?

Photo by Tom Cogill

There you have the crux of some of the most important discussions happening around today’s Information Revolution. It’s a question that will in many ways determine the future of how we search, learn and live. To understand the question — and its many possible answers — you need to know a thing or two about the search landscape as it exists today. While this is not the story of one single company, it is important to note that when the definitive history of the Internet age is written, it will likely be divided into two distinct sections: “Before Google” and “After Google.”

From its rather humble beginnings operating out of a dorm room at Stanford University, Google, the brainchild of Ph.D. students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, has forever changed the rules for how we use the Internet. A 2006 Nielsen/Net Ratings survey found that nearly half of all searches on the Net are through Google. Success of this magnitude is hard to quantify. The company’s 2004 initial public offering gave it a market capitalization of $23 billion. At this writing, stock prices are hovering in the rarified air of $700 per share. In the September 2007 comScore rankings measuring market share among search engine companies, Google dominated, logging 6.6 billion searches, a 57 percent share over Yahoo (23.7 percent) and Microsoft (10.3 percent). So how did Google set itself apart from all of its early competitors in the search wars? First, there is the algorithm.

While other companies ranked their searches based on the number of times a search term appeared on a given website, Google chose to focus on the number of sites linking to that site. This secret formula raised the bar on quality and relevance and continues to play a huge role in the fortunes of businesses large and small worldwide.

Second, Google brilliantly unlocked the potential of Internet advertising, leaping from the banner advertising model (of dubious impact) to an ad-word-based model that delivers our attention to advertisers with an efficiency and effectiveness previously unheard of — and launched Google into a business stratosphere where it has few, if any, equals. (Press releases state, “Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall Web experience for users.”) In 2006, Google reported advertising revenues of nearly $10.5 billion versus $112 million in licensing and other revenues.

Today it seems that Google is looking to take its success into nearly every corner of the communications industry and even beyond, with new announcements appearing at a regular clip. It is aggressively entering wireless telecommunications with its “Open Handset Alliance,” designed to turn that industry on its ear by bringing the open development model of the Internet to the mobile universe, forcing companies away from closed, incompatible networks. It is sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into breakthrough renewable energy sources and making Google Map options available at gas pumps. Its purchase of YouTube has only reinforced YouTube’s founders’ vision that the world remains ready for its closeup.

Why Worry?
So what is it about Google and this new search landscape that should have us worried? Plenty, if you ask Siva Vaidhyanathan, U.Va. associate professor of media studies and cultural historian. He shares his views on the Google universe in The Googlization of Everything, a book project he is writing in plain view through a series of blogs, an intentional contrast to what he and others view as Google’s lack of transparency.

Vaidhyanathan first turned his attention to Google with the 2004 announcement of its Google Books Library Project, which counts the University of Virginia among its 27 partners (see sidebar). “It took me into all sorts of big questions about how good Google is for us,” he says. “We seem blessed because we never have to write a check to this company, yet we also willingly invite it into our lives in new ways every day. I thought it was time that I took a critical and comprehensive view of the company and the way it affects us all. I want to ask some really basic questions, like ‘What does the
world look like if Google is our lens?’”

As our media environment accelerates through profound change, asking the questions is Vaidhyanathan’s mission, and he embraces the complexity. Google, he says, “is a story of excellence as well. It’s a story of a company spending a tremendous amount of money to hire the smartest possible people to produce the best possible products and services.”

Of all the search-engine world’s red-flag issues, the practice of information harvesting continues to draw the most scrutiny. We as Internet users are in the dual role of the hunter and the hunted. Every one of our searches is logged, creating a detailed dossier traced to our IP address. The dossier is then transformed into the ultimate currency as a snapshot record of our questions, hopes, thoughts, wants and needs.

“Any company that amasses that kind of dossier on essentially every citizen of the world, or a very large fraction of citizens of the world, is frightening,” says Dave Evans, associate professor of computer science.

According to Vaidhyanathan, it is not only what Google knows about us but what we don’t know about Google that is most concerning. “Google has mastered a way to so precisely target ads down to your zip codes, down to all of your predilections and desires that it can track. And because of the illusion of anonymity online, we reveal a tremendous amount about ourselves in ways we would probably be uncomfortable about if we actually knew we are giving up something. We are instrumental to Google’s success. And we don’t quite understand the terms of that exchange because we were never asked to be part of that exchange.”

At Whose Service?
The dangers of information harvesting were recently illustrated for the entire world in the high-profile case involving Yahoo and its dealings in China. Search information that Yahoo provided to the Chinese government was crucial to the jailing and alleged torture of a writer convicted by the Chinese government of inciting subversion through pro-democracy Internet writings. During a contentious November congressional hearing, chief executive Jerry Yang announced that Yahoo would pay a cash settlement to the families of journalist Shi Tao (jailed for engaging in pro-democracy efforts deemed subversive) and online dissident Wang Xiaoning, both serving 10-year sentences. The gesture did little to quell fears exposed by the case and positioned the issue on legislators’ radar screens for the foreseeable future.

The increased focus is much needed, says Media Studies Professor Bruce Williams. “Now you have technology that is more and more sophisticated, and they are going to sell my eyeballs to different companies — and there are some cool things about that. I go to Amazon and they suggest books or products I might like, and often I do.

“But when they take the next step and sell that information to advertisers, I become a little more alarmed. And I become really alarmed when the interests of a commercial corporation become involved with the interests of the national security state. Now the same technologies developed by the same companies to target ads at me are the same ones that allow the government to know where I’ve been on the Internet.”

The problem gets thornier when you add globalization to the mix. “If you go on any search engine and type in ‘Tienanmen Square,’ I will get one list back. When I go to an Internet café in Beijing and do the same thing, I get a very different list. Certain sites are just blocked, the algorithms the engines use are different and the targeting technology that sends ads to me gets used by the Chinese government to block sites and do data mining on e-mails.”

Privacy Redefined
There are plenty of search-engine privacy issues that hit much closer to home as well. In January, the University began migrating its virginia.edu e-mail accounts to Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Microsoft Live platforms (by user preference). According to U.Va. Information Technology & Communication officials, the move allows the University to provide users with these platforms’ added functionality while maintaining a U.Va.-branded account well beyond their time at the University. In addition, the switch frees up a significant amount of I.T.C. brain power and expertise to focus on high-performance computing issues related more directly to core academic missions rather than e-mail care and feeding. The University has negotiated with both providers to prohibit ad-targeting to users who are students.

This does not stop Google or Microsoft from harvesting students’ information. “The companies are scanning those e-mails and have on their servers all that information should it ever get subpoenaed,” says Evans. “They have access to it all, and now, because we are in the early stages of this, the impact of collecting this information over someone’s lifetime is hard to even imagine.”

The concern is real yet inevitable in today’s world, according to U.Va. Vice President and Chief Information Officer James Hilton. “Privacy issues are significant and, I think, much larger than this particular move [privatizing University e-mail]. Your bank is monitoring what you are doing, your grocery store is monitoring what you are doing, your gas station is monitoring what you are doing. We live in an age where people and companies are collecting a lot of information about individuals, so questions about privacy exist at the legislative level, where I think privacy issues and efforts should be focused.”

Hilton’s advice to University e-mail users? Read the fine print. “People ought to read their user agreements. That is one of the reasons we wanted to offer a choice between Microsoft and Google — because at any one moment, either of these companies is likely to be considered the company with the most promise or the most feared.

In Corporate Gatekeepers We Trust
In addition to personal privacy issues, an increasing number of media watchers are concerned with search-engine companies’ changing role in the media marketplace. Williams tackles the topic in an upcoming book, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Eroding Boundaries Between News and Entertainment and What They Mean for Mediated Politics in the 21st Century, co-authored with Michael Delli Carpini, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Today’s seemingly endless array of information outlets is both liberating and cause for serious concern, says Williams, who compares the current environment with the “golden age of broadcasting” 20 years ago when approximately 80 percent of all active TV sets tuned into one of three nightly news broadcasts. “In my most optimistic moments, one of the features of the system we have today is that at your fingertips, assuming you are on the right side of the digital divide, you can get more information from more diverse sources about more topics than at any other time in history. But at the same time, I think one of the features of the old system was that we knew who the gatekeepers were. The question of who is standing at the gates today is much less clear, and, insofar as a corporation like Google is at the gate, they have a vital but not recognizable enough role as gatekeepers in the same way that professional journalists do.”

A main element Williams sees lacking today is accountability. “Back in the ‘golden age,’ broadcasters understood themselves to be gatekeepers due in part to the way regulations were written going back to the 1930s about the public service obligation of the broadcast industry. We had a limited number of gates, there was a lot of consensus about who was standing at those gates and the training they had, and the public service obligation was at least in part what drove them. There was a quid pro quo there. How do we understand the public service obligation Google has?”

The question becomes “How is the government going to regulate the new media environment?” Williams says, pointing out that since the advent of television, radio and even the telegraph, governments have struggled with issues of regulation, including patents, copyrights and the rights to transmit information through a pipeline.

“I think technologies have certain potentials, but those potentials are not inevitable, and whether one wins out over another is dependent on the policy decision that governments make. Are they going to continue to allow the communication monopolies to take over [broadcast] frequencies … turning over of the public airwaves to private corporations?”

Issues inherent in the current information environment now regularly extend far beyond search-engine companies. Comcast was recently embroiled in a controversy when the Associated Press reported that it was surreptitiously reducing bandwidth available to large-file sharers. It’s an example of the increasingly politicized notion of “Net Neutrality,” which in its simplest form represents the desire to treat all bundles of information communicated through the Internet equally (and has invoked discussion regarding the role of private companies as bandwidth gatekeepers).

Verizon Wireless recently took the issue beyond the Internet proper when it initially refused to send text messages from NARAL Pro-Choice America to NARAL members who had requested the program, citing the carrier’s policy giving it discretion over “controversial or unsavory” content.

“Information flows to us through pipes,” Williams says, whether through telephone lines, the U.S. Postal Service or the Internet. “The question becomes who has the right to control what information flows through these pipes? We have a certain amount of confidence that the idea of Net Neutrality extends to our mail and to voice conversations, but what is a text message? Is it more like a voice conversation or more like an e-mail?”

That Verizon very quickly backed off when The New York Times and other media outlets reported its stance was a “huge victory for media reformers,” says Williams.

How these questions are being answered today, in small and large ways, every single day, will determine how we receive information in the future. “In 50 years,” says Williams, “when people try to understand how the media environment they are living in came to be, they are going to look back at the decisions being made right now.”