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Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Google is polluting the internet
The danger of allowing an advertising company to control
the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore
by: Micah White
guardian.co.uk
An advertising agency has monopolised, disorganised, and
commercialised the largest library in human history. With-
out a fundamental rethinking of the way knowledge is
organised in the digital era, Google's information coup
d'état will have profound existential consequences.
Google was originally conceived to be a commercial-free
search engine. Twelve years ago, in the first public
documentation of their technology, the inventors of Google
warned that advertising corrupts search engines. "[W]e
expect that advertising-funded search engines," Larry Page
and Sergey Brin wrote, "will be inherently biased towards
the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."
And they condemned as particularly "insidious" the sale
of the top spot on search results; a practice Google now
champions.
Under the sway of CEO Eric Schmidt, Google currently makes
nearly all its money from practices its founders once
rightly abhorred. Following its $3.1bn acquisition of
DoubleClick in 2007, Google has became the world's largest
online advertising company. With ad space on 85% of all
internet sites, upwards of 98% of Google's revenue comes
solely from polluting online knowledge with commercial
messages. In the gleeful words of Schmidt, "We are an
advertising company." Google is not a search engine; it
is the most powerful commercialising force on the internet.
Every era believes their way of organising knowledge is
ideal and dismisses prior systems as nonsensical. Academic
libraries in the US use subject categorisation derived from
Sir Francis Bacon's 17th-century division of all knowledge
into imagination, memory and reason. Yet who today, aside
from one or two exceptions, would try to organise the
internet using a handful of categories? For a generation
trained to use Google, this approach seems outmoded,
illogical or impossible. But modern search engines, which
operate by indexing instead of categorising, are also
fundamentally flawed.
Three hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift foresaw the
cultural danger of relying on indexes to organise know-
ledge. He believed index learning led to superficial
thinking. Swift was right and a growing of teachers and
public intellectuals are coming to the realisation that
search engines encourage skimming, light reading and
trifling thoughts. Whereas subject classification creates
harmony and encourages serendipity; indexes fracture know-
ledge into snippets making us stupid. Thanks to Google,
the superficiality of index learning is infecting our
culture, our society, and our civilisation.
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Google did not invent the index. That honour goes to the
500 monks led by Hugh of St Cher who compiled the first
concordance of the bible in 1230. Nor was Google the first
to dream of indexing all of human knowledge. Henry Wheately
had the idea in 1902 for a "universal index". And Google
was not the first to cynically dump advertisements into
the search-engine index. What makes Google unique is the
extent to which it has, oblivious to the consequences,
made a business out of commercialising the organisation
of knowledge.
The vast library that is the internet is flooded with so
many advertisements that many people claim not to notice
them anymore. Ads line the top and right of the search
results page, are displayed next to emails in Gmail, on
our favourite blog, and beside reportage of anti-corporate
struggles. As evidenced by the tragic reality that most
people can't tell the difference between ads and content
any more, this commercial barrage is having a cultural
impact.
The omnipresence of internet advertising constrains the
horizon of our thought. Seneca's exhortations to live a
frugal life are surrounded by commercials for eco-holidays.
The parables of Jesus are mere fodder for selling bamboo
flooring. The juxtaposition of advertisements with wisdom
neutralises the latter. The prevalence of commercial
messages traps us in the marketplace. No wonder it has
become nearly impossible to imagine a world without
consumerism. Advertising has become the distorting frame
through which we view the world.
There is no system for organising knowledge that does not
carry with it social, political and cultural consequences.
Nor is an entirely unbiased organising principle possible.
The trouble is that too few people realise this today.
We've grown complacent as researchers; lazy as thinkers.
We place too much trust in one company, a corporate
advertising agency, and a single way of organising know-
ledge, automated keyword indexing.
The danger of allowing an advertising company to control
the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore.
The universal index is the shared heritage of humanity.
It ought to be owned by us all. No corporation or nation
has the right to privatise the index, commercialise the
index, censor what they do not like or auction search
ranking to the highest bidder. We have public libraries.
We need a public search engine.
In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a promise: "We
believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed
incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search
engine that is transparent and in the academic realm." Now
it is up to us to realise the dream of a non-commercial
paradigm for organising the internet. Only then will
humanity find the wisdom it needs to deal with the many
crises that threaten our shared future.
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