The Googlization of Everything

DailyProgress.com

UVa professor takes on 'Googlization'
By Brian McNeill
bmcneill@dailyprogress.com | 978-7266
Sunday, September 30, 2007

Type “Siva Vaidhyanathan” into Google and the powerful search engine will turn up hits about the University of Virginia professor’s research into technology and culture, his popular blog Sivacracy.net and even a video clip from his appearance on “The Daily Show.”
Now Vaidhyanathan, who joined UVa’s media studies program over the summer, is taking on Google itself in a forthcoming book, “The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce, and Community - and Why We Should Worry.”

Q: What got you interested in Google as a topic for research?
A: Google makes all these proclamations that it is good for us and good to us. We’re dazzled by it to such a degree that we don’t ask hard questions about it, like what exactly are we giving up to this company?

Q: What do you see as the danger posed by Google?
A: The real question is not one of danger, but one of transparency. You can imagine some nightmare scenarios in which Google allows the government to have too much information about us and people are falsely profiled. Or you can imagine that Google starts censoring access to information. I don’t think either of those scenarios are either imminent or likely, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that as Google grows in importance in our lives, we should demand some accountability. And increasingly, competition is failing to generate that accountability. In other words, Google has managed to leverage its advantage in Web search to become a player, an instant factor, in so many different parts of our lives and so many parts of the economy. My argument is that it’s about time we began to question Google’s motives and tactics.
Google does us a tremendous amount of good work every day. We can’t imagine going a day without it. But what we don’t question is what the cost really is. What is Google getting from us? Well, Google is getting our attention and Google is getting a tremendous amount of money from its advertisers as we click through its ads. But we’re also letting Google profile us in ways that we don’t have any say over. We don’t have any sort of clue as to what Google thinks it knows about us.

Q: What is the downside of that?
A: We might find that our information seeking is warped by its profile of us. Google thinks it can serve us better by giving us what it thinks are more relevant results when we start our search. For example, about six months before I moved here, I was investigating what life might be like in Charlottesville and was doing a lot of Google searches with the word “Charlottesville” in it. I started to notice that after a few weeks, that when I did any kind of search, I was getting a lot of hits that were relevant to local Charlottesville concerns. In other words, Google’s profiling machine had learned that I’d developed an interest in Charlottesville. Now, that might seem like a good thing at first glance. But what if I’m searching for information about medical treatments, or a political issue, or a scientific debate? In those cases, getting the Charlottesville result is not necessarily getting the best result.
Google develops its profile of us based on our patterns. There are some nightmare scenarios attached to this. Suppose I’m doing a research project on al-Qaida and one day the Justice Department subpoenas search records from everyone in this building because they suspect someone in this building is up to no good. It’d be very easy for me to get ensnared in that.

Q: Hasn’t Google also done a lot of good, particularly in terms of access to information and commerce?
A: Sure. One of the great unaccounted-for revolutions that Google has fostered is a complete change in the philosophy of advertising. They’ve completely shaken up the advertising world and essentially rewritten the rules. In advertising, it used to be that you’d buy the biggest possible platform for the biggest possible product. Advertisers rarely exploited niche markets effectively, largely because it was hard to identify and measure the members of the niche. I mean, laxative companies could buy an ad on “60 Minutes,” but that was about as close to niche marketing as you could get.But Google figured out how to target ads as precisely as possible. When you get ads on your Google search results, they are more often than not for very small companies, which are often very local and relevant to your particular search query. That shift, the notion that it’s possible to effectively track advertising and target ads, has been groundbreaking.

Q: You’re known for opposing the Google Library Project, in which Google is scanning millions of books to be posted online in a searchable database. Why would this be a bad thing?
A: More than 20 big university libraries have signed contracts with Google, in which they’re allowing Google’s people to scan large collections of their materials. In the case of the University of Michigan and the University of California, they’re allowing Google to scan essentially their entire collections. This concerns me because while the universities think they’re getting this great service for free, it’s Google that’s getting the gift. Google is getting hundreds of years of riches that the state of Michigan and California have funded. Google’s getting all this content for free and gets to control access to it, gets to control the manner of presentation, gets to control the formats and gets to control the terms of use. I think that’s a bad deal for these libraries. UVa, by the way, is involved in Google’s library project as well.
I also worry that Google’s search engine for the books will be horrible. Their search engine for the Web is based on the principle of incoming links, so the more incoming links a page has, the higher its relevancy score. So when you type in “Boston Red Sox,” you get a ranked list of Web pages based on the number of other Web pages that point to them. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you get the best information, you just get the most popular information. So popularity becomes a proxy for quality. Well, librarians have known for years that popularity is not a proxy for quality.

Q: You’ve started posting excerpts from the book on a blog, www.googlizationofeverything.com, and receiving feedback from readers. What do you hope to accomplish with this process?
A: One of the things that I’ve noticed from writing about and speaking about high-tech communication is that the smartest people thinking about these issues work far away from universities. So by writing in the open, by posting excerpts as I compose them in rough form, I’m inviting all these smart people from all over the world to tell me what I’m doing wrong. It’s like instant peer review.