Peripheral Forces: On the Relevance of Marginality in Networks
Daniel van der Velden is a is designer and researcher. He organized the Quaero (Latin for ‘I seek’) event at the Jan van Eyck in 2007 and has been working on alternative interfaces for search results, to move away from the ‘top-10-search-result-experience’, and to create new search options and visualizations. At Society of the Query, Daniel is speaking on behalf of the design collective Metahaven.

His talk starts with the song “Drive By Hit”, by the music group ‘The Search Engines’. The Search Engines’ song on Myspace illustrates the fading distinction between search engines and social networking sites. More and more these different intranets deal with one particular problem: how to become and stay a main source of information within ‘the growing pool’ of information sources.

Daniel’s talk is the result of a thesis that was developed at both the Quaero conference and the following discussions during the 3 months of research that lead up to the ISEA 2008 exhibition in Singapore. In this thesis Daniel (and Metahaven) stated that the authoritative sources of print have been exchanged for socially powerful, nodal publishers. This form of power is built on social ties, that replace the old fashioned hierarchical authority. Moreover, the system of ‘peer review’ has been exchanged for a social ‘peer pressure’ of linking (nodes feeling the pressure to link to nodes that consent or correspond to their own opinions), which makes most linked nodes redundant. The interesting challenges to any idea, notion or argument are insteas developed in the sphere that is exists outside the center, in a periphery or bailie. These are often not directly connected to the statement and exist isolated as isolated worlds away from the powerful, reigning opinion. Metahaven wants to develop a search engine that connects these different spheres, to provide different points of views on particular issues and be able to put emphasis on the marginal forces.

Daniel van der Velden states that we need a new world political map that takes the changing, globally distributed power relations into account. The biggest question concerning this statement is what such a map would look like (probably dynamic), and how different forms of power can be registered in such a map?

The internet as a finite architectural object, as is reflected by the data centers, the ‘dark fiber’ networks, is actually a real terrain that is not vague at all. They are real geophysical terrains. the physicality is actually finite. Metahaven would like to argue for a political map that would reveal the networks of power to generate a better oversight of where information exists, to connect these different worlds of information and the geographical world as we know it. They want to open the black boxes of cloud computing.

Such a map would also make clear that our use of Google is quite alike the way we drink Coca Cola. We like the sweet taste of Cola, so we keep on drinking it, but in fact we have no idea about its contents. According to Daniel Google is also very much like Ikea, a firm that provides us with furniture and other tools that are created only to be used in one way. This furniture cannot be changed, or expanded upon for different usage. He concludes that we need to be more aware of Googlekia.

With Google seeping into every nook of the conference – the subject, direct or indirect, of most presentations and discussions – you might ask why Google isn’t here to speak for itself. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the company makes it very difficult for staff to speak at events (look at how rarely they attend the industry’s largest conferences: SIGIR, WSDM, WWW.)

Lucky for us here at Society of the Query, we’ve got a company rep in the house, Ingmar Weber, a search engine researcher from Yahoo! Weber rounded out yesterday’s discussion with his lecture “It’s Hard to Rank Without Being Evil: where evil means big centralized and keeping track of a huge query log.” Chock full of metaphors linking data to wealth, his talk proposed an alternative search engine of the future that makes query logs a free public resource.

What’s a query log? Let’s say you’re a designer like Weber and want to pioneer this alternate search engine. First you’d consider ranking, or how to organize, prioritize, and filter the web’s data. You could rank a few ways: by document content, such as a word and where it appears on a page, the most basic ingredient of a search; or by hyperlink structure, using a giant webcrawl to discern hits and inlinks – essentially votes – from other websites. Or you could use query logs. Query logs are quality votes; they show that users who search for x always click on y. They also show relations between pages – page y and z are clicked by the same user. A search engine could use this implicit relevance feedback to infer what people like and direct them there.

Over time, a log of individual search actions becomes powerful resource, a goldmine of data. Put it all together, and we could find out flu patterns or fine tune election predictions, or discover what local bar most people like. But there’s a paradox: if you’re using search data to build a search engine from scratch, you’d need to pull that data from some other, pre-existing search engine. And currently there is no access to major search engines’ query logs. Companies hoard their logs like misers sitting on mounds of gold.

There are other such hidden mounds of gold, or ‘information silos,’ as Weber terms them. Mobility data from mobile phones for instance, could tell us where people are at all times. This would be useful to predict traffic jams, for one. Also shopping basket information, held by credit card companies and stores, could tell us what people are buying, where and when. Imagine a real time snapshot of the amount of junk food consumed.

Weber wants to know if we can unlock these silos and chase the misers away, but still respect obvious privacy issues and potential abuses. How can we all contribute to the query log but protect ourselves from intrusions or misuse of our personal data?

Weber offered a few current examples, such as Ippolita’s SCookies, a site that swaps cookies among Google users; you offer up search information but SCookies makes it anonymous. Data sharing without the creepiness factor. What other legal and technical innovations could open up massive querying data for the public good? There’s no answer yet. But who knows what Weber’s cooking up when he’s outside the office.

French artist Christophe Bruno introduced the audience into some aspects of his art concerning search engines, espacially Google. In order to explain his latest project Dadameter, he initially presented a selection of projects he has worked on over the last years. His career as an aritst started with the project Epiphanies which Bruno established in 2001. It is a Google hack collecting pieces of texts and reconstituting these particular pieces in a new structure. This idea was inspired by James Joyce who walked through Dublin writing down phrase fragments he heard on the streets and called those epiphanies, therefore Bruno calls Google an „ephiphany machine“.

Another project of Bruno is Fascinum from 2001. In this project Bruno developed a program searching through Yahoo! news sites of different countries and select and present those pictures which were looked at the most in each country. In a work of 2002 called Adwords Happening, Bruno depicted the development of a generalized semantic capitalism. He started buying different words at Google‘s AdWords application and presented the price of different words, this creates the awareness that via Google any word of any language has a price and can be bought.

Bruno identified that corporate organizations started to highjack methods formerly applied by conceptual artists and called it „Guerilla Marketing“. This was the origin of a famous work of 2004 called Human Browser, in which persons were verbally displaying search results to other people which were transferred to them in realtime via ear-phones, the individual human being then embodies the world wide web. Logo.Hallucination is a different project of Christophe Bruno in which he scans through pictures circulating in the internet and searches for logos of corporations and organizations that are represented in those pictures. If a logo is detected in a picture Logo.Hallucination automatically sends cease and desist emails complaining about the violation of copyright laws. This selection shows steps leading to Christophe Bruno’s newest project, the Dadameter. It is inspired by the work of the french author Raymond Rousse and is a very ambitious and complex project which cannot be summarized easily, the aim is the production of a map displaying our distance to dada. Due to its complexity it is highly recommended to look up the details about the project here: Detailed information about the Dadameter.

Notes and discussion on The Society of the Query are public on Google Wave:

You can find them here:

with:public “Notes on Society of the Query”

Introduction by Sabine Niederer
Alessandro Ludovico – fresh issue of neural is out, with Yesman on the cover, so promising. Alessandro is a media researcher, media critic, and also a new media artist. He is famous by the work “Google will eat itself”. Also known for the  “Amazon Noir” project.

Alessandro
Thanks a lot for invitation: I will continue with Google discussion, the theories that came out from GWEI project. This project was done by 4 different people; Alessandro was in charge of the theories.  “I want to talk about the GWEI project and about unexpected problems we encountered after this art project. Also I will talk about the Google self referential side. I will try to prove that Google can become/ will establish its role as a public service”.  Therefore the title of the talk is:  “The Google paradigm: for the final dictator it is never enough”

Google establishes monopolies via their pervasiveness, coolness, and attracting functionality. They are error-proof and have an accelerated innovation rate where the word antitrust sounds unattractive.

Google does this by establishing rules that are flexible. Internally, their organizational motto of ‘freedom” turns out to be very effective.  Externally, products are light and convincing. As an example, contextual advertisement is mentioned. Their services are funny and attractive. They make up for a large part of Internet and they want to entertain us forever. There are options to debunk their perfect level of marketing, communication and strategies in our mass-based economy.

About the Google-will-eat-itself project (GWEI)
We started with principally focusing on Google’s way of online marketing. The analysis is that all corporations have to make cultural interfaces in order to have or create a capitol of attention. This becomes more and more precious. As Cory Doctorow stated: we are in an era of distraction.

We created an affective hack by establishing fake websites. This website(s) pretended to be about eCommerce and online marketing. These fake websites were aggregating marketing news websites. After a while, we submitted and subscribed to the Google AdSense program. For those who do not know AdSense: it lets you have textual and visual adds. Google pays money for every click on such an add. What we did then with the ads was that we opened a Swiss bank account that was linked to Google Shares (latest price). So, AdSense income was linked to buying Google shares. Alessandro now shows the actual account (not allowed to show in public, but we will do it anyways). It shows your earnings for every click. Google was giving us the money to buy itself (hence Google will eat itself). Why a Swiss bank account? Because Google is worth more than all the Swiss banks together. Alessandro now shows pictures of the exhibition. The motto of this exhibition was: “lets share their shares”. Google figured out our scheme after a while (via human and software tools they use) they mechanism. They started closing down our Google ads.

The software diagram is now showed. This software makes fraudulent clicks every time a visitor comes to site, sending Google the data as if the user had clicked on the advertisement. So, the software was simulating user behaviour. For us it was a scientific experiment. For me personally, it was also interaction, it was questioning how to define a fraudulent click, because it is the same data as a permitted click would be. It is impossible to distinguish. Who decides that it is a fraudulent action? There is no CCTV on your mouse clicks – but just data from a computer to a computer. GWEI is conceptual artwork, not to practically take over Google. Summarized in a nice calculation: The rate is 23 million years to take over the Google shares (in this project).

Some interesting problems during and after the project
1) We were invited to a conference by Google in half moon bay, California. They said: “Hi guys, we want to learn about what you are doing? Can we arrange a talk?” After a while, they were repeatedly asking the technical details of the software we used and then they disappeared. Maybe the conference never existed.

2) We were approached by a journalist – the chief tech journalist of Reuters – and he was going to make an interview. He was asking Google about our project. Google replied: “We don’t comment on any AdSense account. The journalist said: “Sorry, I don’t have the counter story, so no interview. No further replies.

3) We were also approached by Wired magazine. They were opening an art department.  For this first art department, they want to talk about the “GWEI” project. They were enthusiastic – we did an interview, we made colorful images and sent these images to Wired (page size).  Then they killed the issue. It turned out Google had its influence even on Wired advertisement.

4) We were often approached on Skype by anonymous people. Alessandro now acts out such a Skype conversation:

Guy:  hi
We: hi dear:
Guy: could get you into big trouble
Guy: it is against the law
We: yes, we know, do you know what they collect? So many things are against the law?
Guy: no, just want to know that you know what you are doing.
Guy: fraud is fraud, art or not
We: no we are not stealing. Also, art becomes history
Guy: the judge wont think so
We:  we will take the risk
Guy: Ok, your choice, just wanted to inform you about the risk.

Of course, artists are hoping for these reactions. But it is also sort of a cliche – law firm that defends the big company. Google responded by saying: Oke, we understand its art, but you have to stop now. Of course we never did.

About the Porcelain interface of Google
It is so clean in its interface – everybody likes this interface and it is widely recognized – these interfaces are becoming standard. Clean, rounded, known. But the interface is impenetrable – that is porcelain.  I was in Dublin for a lecture – somebody said to me that if I wanted, I could make a tour inside of Google. I did accept the invitation: in the belly of the beast, so to speak. I had the opportunity to look inside in Google and check the porcelain interface from within. Actually, the type of organization is a recurrent theme (freedom, young, cool to work there). You can see the colors inside the spaces in Google office in Dublin, They are always round- shaped, familiar. The brand is perceivable everywhere and in everything. Especially the G. It struck me. These four colors have influence in our visual life. Alessandro shows the logo of Google wave: it is rounded, smooth.

The Gateway
Beyond the browser interface there are other ways Google is spreading its interface. This gateway to Google becomes self-referential. If we look at Google as a dictator, then how can a dictator be fun for people? By influencing every choice we make? Google knows very well how to entertain Internet users. They periodically release new and effective services; people want them and more of them. It is not Microsoft-like monopoly. Rather, Google, uses their porcelain interface. It is shining and funny and everyone knows it; is familiar with it. Via this interface they are presenting themselves as a public serve. You buy a computer and then there is Google. Everything is light, easy and shining. Fast and undated, the cream of fun and the strawberry of results make the monopoly. The database of Google is very valuable. Most pages on the net are put through page rank algorithms. The website can be located and statistically analyzed; this is the secret dream of every Internet market incentive.

The point is that the user ignores all recorded data. They are hypnotized by interfaces and services. We are giving our data to Facebook without even thinking about it. But, unlike Facebook, this funny empire has another element: advertisement. It is its core business. Everyone can buy in on the AdSense program. Also, tons of people have become publishers. They accent to have ads in exchange for money via clicks. The final scenario is Google as the giant middleman, between advertisement and publishers and thereby sucks all information. Being in the middle, it makes the balance, but is it not a natural system, it is an economical system.

One example: Google mail
Established not because propaganda of 1 GB space, but the effective spam filter, you can be quite sure you can mail safely. Google don’t want to fight spam, because it makes their killer app possible. Googles’ mission: get info and make it accessible universal. This is comparable with the mission of the library of congress. But they are actually a public service. Google will never be. The book- scanning project is mentioned. The aim is to establish a public service. To be more precise: a privatized public service.

I will show a sarcastic video by onion. It is about the outcome of these services. A two minute-video about the opt-out village; http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature_lets_users
Who can build a prison like that? Only a public space can do that.

Conclusions
The Google effect: creating constituent on new business. the greatest enemy of a giant is the parasite. Think about creating Google with itself manually. If a parasite would suck money, they will kill the giant. We have to start decoding and disposing these mechanisms. In order to create cult, we need to create antibodies to  Google interfaces.

Questions

q:
How does competition show up in your analysis? We should also think about competition in companies and product. There are principles in these products by Google. It is a competition. Is web product logic in your analysis?

a: Competition is not abstract concept. Competition exists if there are comparable conditions. When you have gained the Google position of monopoly, there is competition anymore. They have a very successful model os searching them expanding this condition, I cannot think about a real competitor of Google. They can really built new services – Google programming languages. It is not only comprehensive, but it is made by Google, so it was on every technology – it is building on its position. The program of Google is adding this position. I would push more on the cultural side. it s funny, we are pleased by Google. I am a little scared on the final step: becoming a public service (example of Google books). Disappearing of libraries:  culturally we can accept a privatized public service. We should not be happy with that!

Cees Snoek, member of the Intelligent Systems Lab of the University of Amsterdam, talked about the future of video search. He starts by explaining how the traditional and familiar video search engines work: via text queries. But Snoek points out that an interface working with text queries is insufficient to produce satisfying results. This way of video searching may work if you have a simple query like „flower“. Yet if you have a more complicated query like „Find shots of one or more helicopters in flight“ the classical textbased search interface would not generate adequate results.

Furthermore he explains that the problem with picture or video search is that human beings as cognitive animals perceive semantic patterns when looking at something. This is an attribute computers do not have, and therefore Snoek speaks of a semantic gap between machines and human beings who have the ability to interpret what they perceive and transfer it into semantic patterns. The aspect that human visual perception is a very complex task which needs a big amount of ressources is supported by the fact that visual percipience needs 50% of our cognitive capacity, while playing chess only requires 5%. In his research Snoek tries to find a way to close the semantic and to find solutions to label and name the world‘s visual information.

Cees Snoek presents a modern form of semantic video search engine which is called MediaMill. In his model he provides the search engine with a huge amount of image fragments which can be connected with a particular search query. The engine then calculates every image oder video in regards to a lot of different distinguishing features as color, texture or shape. After this step the search engine determines a distinctive correlation between the particular distinguishing features and the search query supplied by the user. This analysis is the basis for a statistic model – the semantic concept detector – which can be used to search a database for other pictures fitting to this model (Example Video of Semantic Pathfinder). The results found by this model are presented to the user by something Snoek introduces as a CrossBrowser (Example Video here). The vertical axis shows the parts of a video detected by the search engine, while the horizontal axis presents the timeline of specific video clip.

Besides Cees Snoek also presents the VideOlympics, a contest where search engine researches compete in video searching. In front of a live audience different teams try to get the best results in video retrieval for a certain set of search queries (VideoOlympics showcase video).

The Ippolita Collective brought a humorous and refreshing change of perspective into the attempt to search and formulate solutions for one of the issues addressed by the second session of the Society of the Query conference, namely Digital Civil Rights. They proposed to change the “what” style of questioning associated with positions of domination, as in “what is to be done?” into a “how” style of approaching issues in order to avoid surrendering to fear, paranoia or the desire to control and protect every aspect of your interactions with technology. While if you ask yourself the “what” questions you may end up in paranoid positions such as  luddism  or technocracy, if you have the “how” attitude, then you are a curious individual, with a desire to learn and to understand, to share and exchange knowledge with others. You may even be some sort of hacker.

The “how” attitude, an attitude which will bring you to media literacy, is, as the Ippolita Collective explains, a convivial model. As opposed to the industrial model of productivity, the convivial model implies maintaining autonomy, creativity and personal freedom in interaction with individuals or technology. How would one build up this model of conviviality? The answer, according to the artistic and research group is to build convivial tools! A convivial tool is not something that you can purchase but something that you have to build yourself in order to have it match your own needs. It is something that you enjoy creating, like making your own wiki.

Can the convivial attitude be applied in approaching our Google/ digital rights/ privacy issues? The Ippolita Collective already has, and the result is a tool named SCookies which you can download for free here. The application takes its slogan, “Share your Cookies!” literally and mixes your cookies with the cookies of other individuals who have installed it, in order to alter your profile and render it unreliable. While it may not be the solution, the SCookies application is emblematic of a style, an attitude of approaching an issue such as digital civil rights.

The Ippolita Collective has recently finished a book on Google, The Dark Side of Google, which you can download for free from their website.

The search market is a multi-billion dollar industry, and given such potential to capitalize there is a large window of opportunity with a vast range of possibilities for the future of search. The mythology of the search engine is that there is only one type of user and only one end-point for any given search. Matthew Fuller, author of a number of books on art, media and software, dismisses such narrow thinking by welcoming a cast of “alternative search engines” that offer some variety to the classic retrieval model of search.

In 1998 at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin presented a paper that documented the structure of a “large-scale hypertextual web search engine” called “Google”. Fuller believes that Page and Brins’ paper is the backbone of all web searches and that within their methodology lies the foundation for other possibilities in the field of search. “If we understand the dynamics and conditions of what comprises a search engine, and if we think it through with a biological metaphor (as having an anatomy), then we can understand how search engines are induced to change ,” said Fuller.

Fuller went on to present a handful of alternative search engines that are augmenting search:

Viewzi's Timeline View

Viewzi provides a variety of different views for searching the web. As an example, Viewzi can present data on vector space where the most relevant data appears closer to the user and the least relevant data further away. In addition, it can Viewzi can then make connections between two different search queries, or it can arrange the items on a visual timeline. Fuller added, “Viewzi sets up multiple views and multiple structures that are different than what we are used to, very different from a flat list.”

Oamos's Search Results

Oamos is the search engine of saturation, entertainment and chaos. Fuller explained, “Rather than an analysis of discreet, rationally composed information, Oamos is about information as a search experience.”

Kartoo's Search Results

Kartoo is a network visualization that reveals your search by mapping data within relationship similar data on the network.

There doesn’t only have to be “one slot to put your data”, “one button to press”, and “one way to return results.” What these examples show is a more multi-linear search which is different from the very flat, linear results given by Google. In conclusion Fuller affirmed, “Designing interfaces that match the potential for the Web’s complexity are underdeveloped, and this will be the challenge for the next wave of search.”

Teresa Numerico is a lecturer at the University of Rome, where she teaches history and philosophy of computer science and epistemology of new media. Her presentation brought a historical and philosophy of science perspective into the themes of this conference: web search, search engines and the society of the query. She attempted to see search engines today through the lenses of cybernetics. According to her, digital technologies today intertwine the cybernetics concepts of communication and control. Just as cybernetics had to deal with communication and control, so search engines today mediate between cooperation and monopoly.

But how more precisely is the cybernetics approach embedded into search engines? According to Teresa Numerico, there are areas in which search engines have a lot in common with the cybernetic approach to machines and creating a cognitive framework, such as: search engines are black boxes in that the ranking process is not transparent, the search function offers output almost automatically to external input, and the ranking algorithm hypothesizes the self-organization within the network.

By offering a strong cognitive framework, search engines are doing the work of the archive, hence her call for an “archaeology of techno-knowledge of search.” Her  notion is influenced by Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. According to Foucault, “The archive is the first law of what can be said. […] But the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass […]; but they are grouped together in distinct figures composed together in accordance with specific regularities.” (Foucault, 1969/1989: 145- 148).

Her main questions in relation to this direction of research into search engines were: Who controls the archive and its meanings?, as we have no control on the meaning that comes out this work; Who is defining the web society archive?, and ultimately, what is there to be done? According to Teresa Numerico, the only possible reaction is resistance. She concluded her presentation with a practical list of suggestions for potential actions of resistance which any of us can take: be creative, not communicative, in order to elude the control component of communication, as well as archiving and searching, minimize the number of online tracks that you leave, close internet devices every now and then, make efforts to vary your sources of knowledge by consulting different search engines, and maintain a cross-media orientation in order to verify the trust and authority of one source against others.

Konrad Becker, co-founder of the World-Information Institute, used the occasion to present the book „Deep Search – The Politics of Search beyond Google“.  He states that it was the editors‘ objective to create a book about searching which does not focus on Google because the concentration on the company from Mountain View, California restricts the view on the impact of search engines in general. Furthermore he points out another aspect that has already been stressed by other speakers at the Society of the Query conference: he prefers talking about a search society, rather than focussing on a control society.

Becker‘s interest is to examine the long history of the attempt to impose order on the fragile universe of information systems. He refers to library sciences as the kind of discipline that tries to analyze how to structure big amounts of information through catalogue systems. Besides Konrad Becker announces that there will be a second “Deep Search” conference organized by the World Information Institute in May 2010 which is the sequel of the first “Deep Search” conference of 2008.

The book is composed of 13 texts discussing the social and political dimensions related to the organization of knowledge through search engines. Authors involved are for example: Geert Lovink, Richard Rogers, Joris van Hoboken, Matteo Pasquinelli, Konrad Becker and Lev Manovich who also contribute to the Society of the Query conference. It is important to discuss these influence of search technology because as Becker says technology always appears to be politically neutral, but it is always connected to politcal and philosophical ideas.