In a continuing quest for personalization Google seems to be turning the web into a “logged-in web”, where you receive personalized results for queries based on whether or not you are logged into an external service/platform. In this screenshot Google shows me four of my Flickr contacts for the query Flickr. Google knows I am logged into Flickr and acts accordingly.

Google also seems to be entering the recommendation culture (popularized by Amazon) in recommending me “something different.” The something different does not look different at all because they are totally related content and social networking platforms. Google knows that Flickr users are likely to use Twitter and Facebook and might be looking for alternative photo sharing platforms like Photobucket and Google’s own Picasa.

Geert Lovink

Introduction by Geert Lovink

Google Research

What is the current state of Google research? The first phase of Google research mainly dealt with the mystery of the algorithm and Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google has since grown into a multi-faceted corporation which requires a move beyond the first phase. The second phase could be considered a European critical perspective:
2007: The Jan van Eijck Academy with Forum on Quaero: A public think tank on the politics of the search engine
2008: Vienna, Deep Search conference
2009: Amsterdam, Society of the Query conference
2010: Book by Peter Olsthoorn ‘De Macht van Google‘ which provides a comprehensive overview of the successes and failures of Google.

The European Continental approach is represented by Matteo Pasquinelli¹, Dymitri Kleiner with his Telecommunist Manifesto and Yann Moulier Boutang who looks at Google as a form of cognitive capitalism. He analyzes how our queries are contributions and activities as a form of human pollination. With small activities contributed by billions we get to understand why Google is so big right now. On the other hand there are resentment theories like “Google is Evil,” how can we counteract that concern? Can we come up with an a-moral perspective that goes beyond good and evil?

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of the Global Street

Google’s Hubris

Googlization is the term used by Siva to describe “the process of being processed, rendered and represented by Google.” It is what we experience through the lens of Google with information as the prime example. It focuses attention to a set of sources that filter all others, but what are the biases? The Googlization of us, our identities, our desires. “Don’t be Evil” is Google’s famous internal memo and its mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” is an audacious idea. It is the original sin of hubris. The mission statement is as old as the company (12 years). It is a totalizing statement: should it have warned us from the beginning? It is ubiquitous but we have not thought about it enough.

How does Google complicate our idea of privacy and our efforts to manage our reputations? We learn that we should not share some things with our parents or other people through trials and errors that lead us to adolescence. Privacy is used in many contexts and Google is involved in this in three ways:

1. Record of our desires (also referred to by John Battelle as the Database of Intentions)
2. Google makes available ‘obscure’ information
3. It actively captures images (of us going through our daily lives, e.g. Google Street View)

The power of the default

Google is obsessed with giving us choices, not simple choices but complicated choices. The trade off is giving up your privacy for functionality but you are never given a contract for this transaction. Privacy is not a substance that cannot be counted or traded because it has different contexts. Google lives on the power of the default: all defaults retrieve a maximum amount of information to the advantage of Google. In the previous sentence Google may also be replaced by Facebook which has the same reputation. How can we counteract this? It requires a set of steps:

1. You have to know
2. You have to care that the deal is not fairly negotiated
3. You have to explore (Google videos, how to)
4. You have to act

In Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein”s book Nudge (2007) they describe how design matters and how it is aligned with a choice architecture. They introduce the libertarian paternalism movement and they strive “to design policies that maintain or increase freedom of choice.”² (p. 5) It is a meaningful freedom with real control over issues of one’s life. Only the elite and proficient get to opt our of the choice architecture set by Google. A vulgar libertarianism where self help is available in the settings. It is not only elitist but it is also anti-social (you help yourself in the settings but not others).

Privacy interfaces & The Cryptopticon

There are different types of privacy interfaces:

• Person-to-peer
• Person-to-power
• Person-to-firm
• Person-to-state
• Person-to-public

We are now all agents of surveillance as we all carry video cameras. Google and Facebook scramble the above described different contexts. Our new information system, with the example of Google Buzz, inflated and ignored these contexts. On top of that there is a difference between different types of content indexed by Google:

1. Content on third party service websites
2. User-generated content platforms from Google (Blogger, Orkut, etc.)
3. Actively capturing content (Google Books).

These three require three levels of responsibility and regulation according to Siva.

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Google seems to thrive on the economics of attention where:

• Controversy is good
• Users scouring for troubling photos saves Google staff labour time to do the same (I use the example of the GeenStijl community looking for “interesting” Google Street View pictures when first introducted in the Netherlands in my lectures for the first year students on crowdsourcing)
• There is “User-generated editing”
• Any time more people are using Google, it’s better for Google
• Defaults are set for maximum exposure.

Opting-out of being indexed may be physical as in the case of people in Germany putting signs in their windows that said “Don’t include me in Google Street View.” Siva refers to Google’s default setting policy as protocol imperialism: Google likes us to be accustomed to their default settings.

The Cryptopticon

In Bentham’s Panopticon the instrument of surveillance was clear:  you could see the camera/mirrow. If you don’t see it, it can’t do its job. Now, the instrument of surveillance is hidden and we are not allowed to understand the instruments of surveillance at work. The government wants you to slip up. Facebook and Amazon want you to express your niche preferences to track idiosyncrasies. The opposite of the panopticon, the cryptopticon wants you to express deviations.

Q&A

During the Q&A it is mentioned that in the case of Google Street View the cars are visible and as such the instrument of surveillance is not hidden. Siva answers that the cryptopic example in this case would be that Google was also retrieving Mac addresses and Google claimed “they didn’t know.”

Rob Gonggrijp: How can the deal with Google ever be collective because of the different types of privacy (contexts)?
Siva Vaidhyanathan: A collective baseline with exceptions.

Colleague Michael Stevenson ends the evening with the question if it is enough to think about Google as Google effects. To what extent have we been Googlized already?

1. Google’s PageRank. Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and Rentier of the Common Intellect[↩]
2. Richard H. Thaler and Prof. Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, 1st edn (Yale University Press, 2008). [↩]

Opening lecture of the New Media Masters Graduation Day. University of Amsterdam, 21 September 2010.

Joris van Hoboken, PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam, talked about what Google knows and what Google wants. Google is no longer just a search engine, it is now an extraordinary collection of services. What does it want with all these services? An image of a whiteboard used during one of Google’s brainstorms reveals a desire for Digital World Dominance which may be achieved by providing all the services needed. Google wants to be the most trusted personal service provider. It wants to be the matchmaker of information demand and supply.

What Google knows.

Google knows a lot but we don’t really know for sure what it really knows. As a methodology van Hoboken applies the famous concept of the known unknowns, made famous by United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

Google knows your friends and family. Google knows your digital literacy level, it knows how you search and how advanced your search queries are. Google knows if you are paranoid, if you go to the Google Privacy center. Google knows when we are sick, e.g. Google Flu Trends. Google knows when we are voting, e.g. Google General Election 2010. Google knows what we are voting and who we should vote for.

Google knows your unknown knows.

(c) Peter Steiner, July 5th 1993 for an issue of The New Yorker.

Google knows you’re a dog.

The power of Google is the power to decide which of the known unknowns are real. A problematic issue that needs to be addressed is that Google doesn’t want to take responsibility for what it knows.

More pictures from the Graduation Day on Flickr.

I’m not a big fan of Google’s new result page which seems to favor freshness and a ubiquity of entry points over relevance. Or, in other words, it is increasingly referring to itself (Google News, Updates, YouTube) for results as may be seen in the following picture:

Let’s look at the ranking of the results:

1. Google News Results
2. Google’s best friend Wikipedia (hitting Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button more than often sends you to a Wikipedia entry. Or as Mathys from Mobypicture stated: “When Google is out of luck (when it doesn’t know where to send you after hitting the “I’m feeling lucky” button) it will send you to Wikipedia
3. A “plain” website.
4. Realtime results from the Updatesphere. Note that these updates are constantly refreshed so that there is always something moving.
5. Shopping
6. Images
7. Video

There is only one “plain” website listed on the first half of the page. All the other entries refer to Google’s subspheres like News, Updates, Shopping, Images, Videos except for Wikipedia. By showing a variety of results from its other indices it is becoming self-referential.

It’s no news that Google Google loves fresh content and especially updates. With its many indexing deals with popular micro-blogging platforms like Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca it has access to a big amount of new and fresh content. At the end of 2009 Google started displaying status updates in their results and shortly after Google officially welcomed the updatesphere as a subsphere of the web that can be searched. This subsphere has now penetrated the Google front page, along with Google’s other subspheres.

In “organizing the world’s information” Google is becoming increasingly self-referential.

Sick and tired of using Arial, Verdana and Georgia on your blog? Ok, I must admit, I love Georgia and I’ve been using it for years but after a while you want something else. There simply aren’t enough websafe fonts that look good and are compatible. There are several solutions like replacing the header with images (SEO-FAIL!) or Flash (mobile, anyone?) and more recently Typekit. I got a Typekit account months ago but never got around to implementing it because it looked so cumbersome. And now, our friend Google, released the Google Font API and it’s foolproof. Even though Typekit has way more fonts the simplicity of the Google Font API is wonderful.

Their instructions on how to use their fonts on your website are in plain English but here’s the translation to WordPress:

1. Add a stylesheet link to request the desired web font(s) in header.php:

   <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
   href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name">

2. Style an element with the requested web font in your stylesheet, eg. custom.css:

   h1 { font-size:2.4em;  font-family: 'Droid Sans', arial, serif;}

That’s it! Writing this blogpost took me longer than implementing new, lovely fonts on my blog.

Google’s indexing of the updatesphere is going quite well with the recent news that it will soon show all tweets going back to March 21, 2006. However, there seems to be a very basic flaw in its search design: it returns the platform name for a query! So if I search for Google it will include Google Buzz and if I search for Twitter it will return everything posted from Twitter.

I can imagine a finegrained search similar to “Google” site:http://awebsitehere.com that would allow you so specify within which platform you would like to search. A search query would then look like this: “Google” platform:Twitter or “iranrevolution” platform:FriendFeed.

Just a thought.