Digiwonder?

Quick– what was the top search on Google in '05?

A) Britney Spears?

B) Hurricane Katrina?

C) Janet Jackson?

D) xbox 360

You can find the surprising answer on Google's Zeitgeist, the site, which author John Battelle says of in his new book:

…Google [has] more than its finger on the pulse of our culture, it [is] directly jacked into the culture's nervous system. (The Search, Page 2)

The trends Zeitgeist summarizes, while interesting, are only a tiny tip of a gargantuan ice-berg of data Google possesses. Every search you make, every click you take, Google's watching you. This is all at once thrilling for those of us interested in the social sciences and totally scary in a Big Brother way.

Again, Battelle:

…AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo– hold a massive amount of this data. Taken together, this information represents a real time history of post-web culture– a massive clickstream database of desires, needs, wants, and preferences that all at once can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited for all sorts of ends. (The Search, page 6)

In his book, Battelle dubs this the "Database of Intentions." He likens the hoards of data housed on Google's servers to be like a layer of dirt cradling artifacts. Maybe someday anthropologists will conduct digital digs to understand our culture post turn of the new-century.

Or maybe this digging has begun. Two examples deal with the Chinese and US governments. And Google's response to these issues are testing Google's ability to live up to its mantra, "Don't be Evil."

Issue 1: US Government demands search records to prove we need to pass the Child Pornography Act. Google resists. Is the company evil for not helping the government crack down on pedophiles? Or is it wise as compliance could lead to a slipery slope of more government demands for information?

Issue 2: Google agrees to Chinese demands that they censor searching. Are they creating a crack in the Chinese government's media control? Better to have a censored Internet than no Internet, right? Or is Google just seeing green in the face of the multi-billion dollar Chinese market? Forget about rights to information, China's a gargantuan cash cow.

Beyond privacy issues with the government, there are private sector quandaries. As technology develops and marketing becomes more personalized and targeted, will Google let me opt out of tailored advertising? Puh-leeeeaaaaaazeeee no more ads, no matter how much some clever algorithms think I want them.

Stay tuned, these questions won't go away anytime soon.

–Suz

Ten years ago, when I was a college senior, the computers in my life were Herman, my beloved Mac Classic II (I stuck large googly eyes on him, which gave him an expression of perpetual yet endearing shock) and an army of soul-less monitors in the computer lab, where I plunked out countless green lettered emails to my friends at other colleges. That year, I took an elective computer course that covered the wondrous intricacies of Excel and PowerPoint (yawn).

At some point in my junior or senior year, a few more PCs showed up in the computer lab. Unlike the others, these were hooked up to this thing called the Internet or World Wide Web. As I turned my thoughts toward graduation and finding a job, someone or something gave me the idea to test out this Web and see if it could offer me any job leads. While I only found techie jobs, I at least got lists of links to organizations I thought could be cool to work with. Not so shabby, this Internet thing.

Back in ’96, as I sat in that sterile computer lab, I was clueless about the significance of the search I had just completed. And I certainly had no idea that some 2400 miles away at Stanford in California, a beehive of genius programmers, high rolling venture capitalists, savvy MBAs, and brilliant entrepreneurs were busy paving the way for me and everyone else to perform thousands of more searches for jobs, camping gear, Snoopy lunch boxes, movie times, boyfriends and even ourselves with ever growing efficiency and effectiveness. The stuff these strangers cooked up in their dorm rooms was quickly altering the way each of us interacted with our world everyday of our lives.
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture by John Battelle zaps readers back to the 90s and early new century and gives a play-by-play of how Internet search engines came into being, rose and fell, and how Google pulled to the forefront of the pack.

The tale is fascinating on a number of levels. Here’s what struck me the most:

• Google rose to the top of the search engine pack not because it merely improved on existing search technology, but because it came at search from an entirely different angle. (Chapter 4: Google is Born) Before Larry Page got to Stanford, the web crawlers of all major search engines flew through pages of content on the Net, identifying key words and indexing them. By the mid 90’s, spammers were cleverly spiking their sites with keywords to drive unsuspecting traffic to their sites—often porn sites. So the need for a new search paradigm was growing quickly. Page, who thought about going into academia and who’s dad is a professor, never exactly set out to create a bigger, better search engine but his doctorate research, which was influenced by his knowledge of academia—led him there. In peer-reviewed journals, academics must survey and cite existing research in order to demonstrate how their work builds on a body of knowledge. In this way they build credibility for their hypotheses. They give each other academic tips of the hat—or backrubs. Page, who had a website of his own, decided he wanted to know how many people were linking back to it. And how many people were linking to other sites? Web search engines could track outgoing links, but did not track incoming ones. Page’s project “BackRub” was the nascent Google. Instead of declaring a search result valid because of key word matches alone, Page’s BackRub looked at who was linking to any given page and who was linking to the pages linking to that page. The more links he reasoned, the more on target and credible the source was likely to be. Smart, eh? I find it so interesting that one of the most significant leaps forward in the modern digital world was inspired by an age-old practice within ivory towers. I often feel that great creators are not those who necessarily think up entirely new ideas, but are savvy folks who see new applications for, or twists on, existing things. It’s as if they have special night-vision goggles for seeing what the rest of us see every day, but in an entirely new way.

• Great ideas are magnets—for good and bad. Battelle’s vignettes of the positive and negative developments that have or could result from Google’s success are also fascinating. Making a family guy and small businessman a decent living for his online shoe shop- positive. Changing your search algorithms so the guy drops off of Google’s searches and nearly looses his business—negative. (Chapter 7: The Search Economy) Out smarting the spammers—positive. The spammers keep up with you—negative. Being smart as hell—positive. Being arrogant in the face of your users’ needs—negative. Creating the largest repository of people’s activities and intentions via search records—in an anthropologist’s hands, probably positive. This data the government's hands for "tracking terrorists"— well, let’s just say bye, bye privacy. (Chapter 8: Search, Privacy, Government, and Evil)

• Silicon Valley in the 90s. A modern day wild west. Hold on tight. I can only imagine the feeling of being at Stanford or inside Yahoo!, Excite, GoTo.com or some of the other companies Battelle chronicles in his book. Surviving the Internet’s rocket launch and torpedo fall took brains, foresight, a penchant for turning on a dime, and luck. In fact, I was surprised to see how much of Google’s success can be attributed to luck. Had some of their competitors (GoTo.com) made different decisions, had Page and Brin managed to find a buyer for their early Google, history would have turned out much differently. (Chapters 4 & 5)
So if the E-Geek in you is busting to get out this summer, add Battelle’s smart and comprehensive book to your reading list. I definitely feel a thousand times more in-the-know.

Now, if only some Silicon Valley techno-genius could figure out time travel via the Web. Then I could send a copy of Batelle's book back to my college senior self. I'd read it instead of learning how to make PowerPoints.

–Suz