America's Next Top Information Professional

I just came from a talk by Siva Vaidhyanathan about his forthcoming book, The Googlization of Everything. It was a full house, a rich lecture, and folks had some great questions. Vaidhyanathan walks an interesting course: he freely acknowledges that Google is very good at what it does, and praises the company’s willingness to adapt to innovations. His concerns pertain to the lack of transparency, the absence of public accountability, the potential for certain people to , and the emphasis on speed over other values. Ultimately, he believes that Google’s form of searching reinforces user satisfaction: you get what you wanted, which pleases you, so you search for more of the same. This is, he pointed out, great for shopping, but less great for learning.

A few take-aways for me:

• In discussing the non-neutrality of search engines, Vaidhyanathan used the example of a Google search for “Jew.” This search, performed in the United States, will pull up quite a few hits for anti-Semitic conspiracy groups. In Germany, where these websites are considered hate speech, Google has modified the search so those results will not be shown. (It isn’t clear to me .) While Vaidhyanathan used this to point out that it’s not just computers crunching numbers, there are indeed people, I had some other questions. In Germany, would Google be held accountable for providing access to those websites? Also, it is a keen point that, you pick your search terms based on what you’re looking for: very different results will come up for “Judaism” or “Jewish history.”
• According to stats from comScore, Google only has about a 65% share of the US search market. Okay, that’s big, but I was surprised by this — I would’ve guessed the numbers to be much higher. Vaidhyanathan said that in Western Europe and the UK, it’s closer to 95%. Where does Google not do well? Apparently, in China, Russia, and former USSR republics. He mentioned Baidu as a leader in China.
• Vaidhyanathan also talked about “public failure,” where private interests step in to do work of public interest, because the public institution didn’t have the resources to do it, or because, for whatever reason, folks believed that the free market would just sort things out better. I see this as related to my fears about the corporate roots of 2.0 — when the conversation is framed within the expectations of the market, it immediately puts not-for-profit institutions at a disadvantage. I’m not sure if I’m expressing that clearly, but I think about it a lot.
• Is speed really what we need in searching? Google aims to please and to do so immediately, but that doesn’t necessarily fulfill all our goals in research. Kraftylibrarian has a timely post about this very same question here.

He only had an hour, plus some time for questions, which was hardly time to get into the meat of all his arguments, so I’ll just have to read the book. But man, there’s plenty to think about.  It’s good to have a complex relationship with Google.

*He defined “googlization” as “the process of being processed, rendered, and represented by Google.”