What's Wrong with Google

Google has been fabulously successful, as everyone knows. My understanding of their basic search algorithm, which gave/gives noticeably better results than the visible competition, is simply using the relative number links to sites from other sites as 'votes' for how 'most people' would rate the target site. Thus, it is remarkably like, and for all I know, probably derived from, the practice in academia of rating academics by how many citations their papers accrue. For this reason, I would suspect that this would form a sound basis for challenging some basic patents that Google must hold in this area, as this technique of 'rating' (which is what a searching engine does) has plenty of previous use.

But that is not why I write this. My intention is rather to question what the effect of Google's ubiquity has been on the quality of the web, and, the somewhat different problem of whether Google is yielding to probable temptations to alter their search results for their, rather than the searcher's, gain.

One obvious effect of Google has been to commercialize just about every square inch of leftover screen real estate on a significant proportion of sites of all types. Although the ads are presumably less obtrusive for being simply text, they are finding placements in increasingly obnoxious proximity with the 'content' text of the site such that how it is not uncommon to find yourself wondering in some instances which is which. As the basic ad placement is the prerogative of the site owner or designer, Google can hardly be faulted for big errors of design, per se.

However, I would counter that Google can indeed be faulted for this simply by providing the financial incentives for creating the web equivalent of thousands of miles of strip malls, which profits Google, the site owners (inasmuch as he is able to profit), the companies paying for the ads, in short, everybody but the web surfer, whose attention has been commodified without his realizing it (and the site owner, inasmuch as he has diluted his own message and been a party to the high-jacking of the surfer's attention).

This simple analysis might be contested by a capitalist, who might vigorously opine that the surfer, too, stands to gain from his encounter with the ad, as it may satisfy a need, albeit a need that the surfer may not have unrealized he had. And, of overriding importance, each time an encounter such as this results in money changing hands, it greases the wheels of commerce, contributes to the general well-being of society, and serves to illustrate the wonderful efficiency of the marketplace.

Google is providing an unprecedented degree of 'relevance' in the placing of its ads. The idea is to provide surfers with ad options that are as semantically close to the content as possible (and to companies placing the ads, potential customers who are already 'thinking around' their product area). This narrowly targets specific ads to specific potential customers, at least insofar as the content describes the wants of the people who read it.

Google can populate very cheap screen space with ads very cheaply. The ad content seems to be generated dynamically, that is, at the time each page is served, rather than in the conventional manner, as part of the page layout phase. This and automation of click statistic collection (the basis for payments to the site owner) make Google ads very cheap for a fairly high-quality pool of potential buyers, this last fact assuring good fees to Google.

The last quality of Internet advertising Google is exploiting is the gathering of valuable statistics on all aspects of their operation, which has allowed them to fine tune it on a near-real-time basis.

So, one might ask, what does all of this mean to me? I feel it means a great deal, because it is the first time that such a large-scale operation, with its coordination of content and advertising, has blanketed the Internet (virtual) landscape to such a depth that the experience of using the web is being profoundly subverted for economic purposes. It also has the potential for changing the usefulness of Google's primary product, namely, its search engine.

Let's deal with the potential effects on Google search first. The prime utility of Google, or any search site, is whether it yields useful results in a reasonable time. This has been done amazingly well for billions of searches. A main objective of those who profit from search engine exposure is to be as close as possible to the top of the list of search results. Methods of spicing up pages to favor top listings by search engines are the stuff of hacker legend.

All of this worked great when the Web was young. Now, it has grown up and dreams of a Universal Library have fallen by the wayside as a horde of would-be billionaires are seeking to exploit every corner of the Web to generate fabulous profits by one means or another. This has served to all but eliminate 'Page Not Found' warnings, for instance, which are now replaced by countless 'value-added' redirection pages, dolled up to appear as neutral indices of possible interpretations of the URL that was not found and which are, you guessed it, click ads. My ISP, Verizon, is so smarmy that it intercepts 'Page not found' pages and produces their own click ad pages instead. The effect is somewhat like looking for a book in the library and, when not finding it, instead being thrust into the middle of a bazaar filled with loud venders hawking their wares. I may be being overly sensitive but--no thanks.

Sites such as these, really 'meta-sites', seem to be finding their way into search results. I have found that, often, the first ten or more items of a request on a broad category yield not primary sites but bogus meta-sites that purport to be asking you to refine your search. Now, for all I know, all of these pages, which are not recognizable companies, are simply CGI fictions that are built dynamically by someone onto a spare server, hoping that the user will make a click that will generate revenue. The outcome is that I have to look further down in the original results to get the real sites that I had in mind to begin with.

I should think that the temptation to do this would be irresistible for many self-righteous profiteers determined to mine such opportunities the Web affords to make a fortune.

It shouldn't be hard to see where I stand on the commercialization of the Web: I think it is as misguided as putting advertising on every page of every book published; as placing billboards on every inch of every highway, byway and cowpath; as running a constant crawl of ads on both top and bottom of every movie and entertainment produced; as having loudspeakers blaring ads during every musical and theatrical performance; that bad, and worse. Why? For the very reason that my examples seem ludicrous; because carving up the surfers' minds and selling them off to the highest bidder may be 'the American way' or the most perfect example of economic efficiency yet devised, but it is wrong. When the very quality of experience is up for grabs, it is devalued to arbitrarily low levels by the elites who stand to profit therefrom.

Advertising is predicated on the notion that attention, the spotlit, center stage of consciousness, can be divided into arbitrarily small temporal units. Now, even though there have been attempts to derive profit from sub-second exposures (e.g. subliminal advertising), such attempts, when recognized, have been rejected as being too blatantly manipulative, whereas ads of, say, 5 seconds are 'fair game' and ads of 10 seconds are commonplace on television. However, even after all these years of 'accepted practice', I think it is still worth contemplating what effect this Balkanization of consciousness has had on individuals and society at large.

The easiest way to get an idea of what people, on average, were able to think about in earlier times is simply by reading old newspaper articles, easily done on the Internet. Without belaboring the point, it is easy to observe much longer articles in greater depth with larger vocabularies in papers published 50 years ago than today. The same measures can be used to compare 50 and 100 year-old papers; I say that the 100-year-old articles are even more 'difficult' than those half their age, but would hazard the opinion that the 'dumbing down' has been even much greater in the last 50 years than in the 50 previous years. Why would this be?

It was roughly 100 years ago that education began a long decline, when its philosophical emphasis shifted from a 'leading out' (e+ductare) of individuals from the darkness of ignorance to the utterly different emphasis of preparing students to be functioning workers and citizens. The reasons for this momentous change were many, including, the emergence of huge industrial concerns in need of trained labor, the influx of large numbers of immigrants needing to be integrated into society and, a new faith, doubtless on the heels of industrialization, that informed a new ethic of placing people into their 'rightful place' in society and the workforce.

So, the noble goal that had illuminated the process of education since classical times, forming discerning minds, was tossed in favor of the 'practical education', training, really, of fodder for industry. No use preparing the masses for a life of contemplation, we can imagine the captains of industry saying among themselves, when they will be spending their lives as part of the machinery of modern life.

What was lost? Ancient Greek and Latin, which had from the Renaissance until around 1900 been a window leading to realms of classical literature, philosphy, philology, history and Roman law for countless students and was the common ground from which grew our republic. Euclidean geometry was, for twenty centuries, the basis for learning mathematics, not simply as a set of techniques to be applied, but as a mental discipline for establishing incontrovertible proofs. The fruits of mathematics can be applied by anybody in possession of a computer, but the basis at its root, mathematical thinking, if you will, is no longer a part of everyone's schooling. The inclusion of music and art as an integral and necessary part of everyone's education has been swept aside and pushed into optional 'electives'.

I propose that the first great degradation of public literacy was one result of degrading the life of the mind in general through the wholesale destruction of an educational tradition of many hundreds of years, all in the name of 'modernity' or 'efficiency'. The second, and greater, degradation, down to the 'sound bites' of today, is easily chalked up to the brain-numbing exercise of advertising, visited on everyone foolish enough to subject themselves and their children to commercial television. And, not coincidentally, the first process made the second possible, as an uneducated public is a pliant one.

And now, the Internet, a medium of supremely more promise than television, has been set upon by the same soldierly ants who commandeered television to be an instrument of plutocrats. I predict that they will not stop until every page of the Internet is laced, through and through, with mind-altering, mind-mincing ads, making sure that every surfer's attention is never far from the business at hand, namely, someone else's need to make money. Although Google may assert that their business plan is in no way 'evil', I would counter with the observation that Google and its imitators are destined to be known as the destroyers of the Web, not an enviable reputation to have, and hardly benevolent.