The Googlization of Everything

Google, search, and the economic imperative of comprehensiveness:

The topic this week was whether the classic concerns about media concentration around broadcasting and publishing, i.e. the worry that more and more media outlets are owned by fewer and fewer companies, applies and raises the same implications in new media industries, such as the search business. The point I think I closed with today, though it’s only coming clear in my head now, is that the concerns we had for traditional media emerged from the “economic imperative of mass appeal”: If your business model depends on helping an advertiser get the same message in front of as many eyes as possible, and the economics are such that it costs a whole lot to make the movie or show that’s going to draw them in but cheap to get that show to a huge audience, then the tendency is to try for a mass audience, make one thing as appealing to as many as possible, and be sure its something tht advertiser won’t shy away from. And from that, the risks and abuses that can come from media concentration are of a certain kind: shying away from volatile topics, homogenizing the content, chasing past successes, failing to report on news that might damage your own business or that of your advertisers. (This is not to say that this always or even endemically happens, but that it can, and does.)

On the other hand, in the search industry, the business model is to attempt to give each user what they’re looking for, not give them all the same thing. And advertisers pay to associate themselves to specific terms and pages, not to be everywhere for everyone. So the business logic, and with it the risks that emerge from economic concentration, come not from mass appeal but from the “economic imperative of comprehensiveness”. The best search engine will be the one that catalogs the most of the web, or the most of the web that’s relevant to the most people, and serves that index up in a way that satisfies users requests, or seems to. The goal is to give every user to the right advertiser, every advertiser to the right user. And it benefits the search company to find ways to bring users to them and to keep them there, not just by doing search well, but by building themselves into other services so users are channeled back to them. (Google does this by building its search into a browser toolbar, into other websites, by building the search into GMail and YouTube and Picasa and Google Maps and Google Books and iPhones and so on…) This is the “googlization of everything” that Siva Vaidhyanathan has been writing about.

And, thus, all the kinds of risks and abuses that have emerged around Google’s dominance in the search industry and around concentrated corporate ownership in the new media realm all stem from this economic imperative of comprehensiveness. It is not about content control or political timidity, as it can be with traditional media. Instead, its Google choosing to scan books first and letting copyright owners opt-out (rather than asking them all for permission first, which would have been legally safer) — the value of that library will depend in large part on being able to say that its “everything,” or close to it. Its the temptation to mine GMail messages and search queries and Deja News posts as consumer data to better fit ads to users and search terms, because Google needs to know as much as it can about every user and every kind of interest, no matter how obscure. Its the Google Maps “street view,” where privacy concerns come second to the impulse to document every inch of every street corner.

This framework, I’m sure, was inspired by Elizabeth van Couvering’s dissertation work on search engines, part of which was assigned reading for my class today.