Cross posting from my KMi blog (which has paragraph level commenting enabled to facilitate discussion).

I’ve just read an article which explicitly considers the evaluation of search engines with respect to their epistemic functions under a social epistemological perspective. There’s a pre-print available http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/teaching_staff/simpson/simpson_index.html and the citation is: Evaluating Google as an Epistemic Tool, Metaphilosophy 43:4 (2012) 426-445.
Interestingly, the article arose from PhD research funded by Microsoft Research Cambridge – so it’s great to see they have an interest in the knowledge implications of their tools, and evaluation of them along those lines. I’ve been thinking about this a bit, but the below was written in a morning, so apologies if it isn’t clear.

The Article

The article suggests:

• “Search engines are epistemically significant because they play the role of a surrogate expert” (p.428)
• Search engines should be assessed by:
  1. precision and recall, where precision is a measure of relevance of recalled documents (relevant:irrelevant) and recall is a measure of completeness of the set (relevant^recalled:relevant^ontheweb) (p.431)
  2. ‘timeliness’ – the duration it takes for searchers to find a relevant link (thus, if the first result on a SERP is relevant, this will give the best score) (p.432)
  3. ‘authority prioritisation’ – they should prioritise those sources which are credible. This could be assessed in the same way as timeliness with relevance replaced by reliability (p.433). Computational markers for such ranking are challenging to achieve. I would suggest that ‘link is in part to measure this quality.
  4. Objectivity – “a search engine’s results are objective when their rank ordering represents a defensible judgement about the relative relevance of available online reports”, thus, if there are 2 sides to a story with an equal quantity of ‘hits’ behind them, ordering such that the first 50% regard one side, and the latter 50% the other lacks objectivity.

Now this last point is particularly interesting and I shall return to it shortly. First I’ll cover what Simpson goes on to argue.

1. Personalisation in search results occurs
2. We have a tendency towards confirmation bias, we are biased to information which affirms our prior beliefs
3. Our searches may seek affirming information, but moreover search engines – in customising our results based on our prior searches and result opening – may also do this
4. They therefore fail to represent objectively the domain being searched over, instead representing a subset of that relevant domain which affirms the searchers prior beliefs
5. Personalisation fails ’4′ above.

The point is “When the bubble is based on individual personalisation, only “epistemic saints” are immune from its effects – the people who scrupulously ensure that they seek out opposing views for every search they conduct in which they there are importantly opposed views on the matter. The rest of us one hopes, make the effort to seek out opposing views in serious enquiries”. (p.439)

Simpson thus suggests two solutions:

1. Rational enquirers should turn off personalisation (throw off the shackles of Plato’s cave!) or use search engines such as DuckDuckGo
2. There is a prima facie case for regulation of search engine providers because there is a public good in objectivity

Objections & comments

On ‘objectivity’

There is a straw man at play here – we’re asked to imagine the world exactly as it is (with important philosophers from many nationalities), but imagine you search for “important philosophers” and the top 1/3 of results are German, the next 1/3 neither French nor German, and the bottom 1/3 French (p.435). But this isn’t how search engines work – if we assume that 1/3 of all important philosophers are French, 1/3 German, 1/3 neither, and that the internet reflects this to some degree, we can almost certainly assume that there will be at least a ‘mixing’ of philosophers although there might be some bias.

Now, there is a concern that not all the information is on the internet – so there’s an interesting question here about the testimony of silence (when can the absence of testimony be taken to tell you something?) and the epistemic virtues of searchers (what abilities should searchers deploy prior to making assumptions based on the absence of results?) – but these are separate issues. As an aside, an obvious example cases here is in the gender bias of historical artefacts, and the subsequent gender bias on Wikipedia – the silence tells us something, but not what can be taken at face value (that women did very little); we expect good epistemic agents to assess such information in light of the epistemic norms which include some awareness of historiography.

I think this is a pretty minor issue in so far as the actual concern being raised is whether or not the search engine reflects the epistemic environment or not. If not, but – algorithmically – it should, that is of concern because it suggests some downgrading of websites for questionable reasons (they contain French philosophers, they’re not English language sites, etc.). But by meeting the first 3 requirements using some version of the pagerank algorithm this should be less possible – issues regarding the testimony of silence aside. Where such issues remain (despite good algorithms) this is a problem with the epistemic community – the community has failed to highlight relevant links, write articles, connect pages, etc.

So, the issue of objectivity in so far as objectivity goes is, does the SERP reflect the epistemic landscape of the internet, as a whole. I think there is an issue with this in that it is entirely possible to “swamp” issues (e.g. google bombing) such that there are two takes on a concept, but only one is presented – but I do not think this is an issue of search engine objectivity, but rather of the epistemic community, and indeed the community often puts rather a lot of effort into combating this issue, with punitive action taken by search engine providers against those sites that engage in such practices. I will, below, talk about one possible solution to this issue of ‘presenting the various takes’ on an issue.

On the testimonial nature of search engines

This concern relates to what we’re taking the search engine to do. And again, I’d say this is a relatively minor point, but an important one. The article in various places implies that the search engine itself is a surrogate expert, or that it is epistemically responsible for the contents of the epistemic environment (across which it surveys/crawls), or that it provides testimony in itself (the Knowledge Graph is an interesting counter point to me here) – but I do not think this is the epistemic quality of a search engine. Search engines can testify that x is considered a good informant – but that is all. They are good at pointing out experts – and indeed, those are the criteria they are judged against. Simpson does make it clear (p.428) that what search engines testify on, is not the content itself, but rather who might be a good source of testimony. However, I think this causes a problem for some arguments (see the above paragraph). What the search engine represents is qualities of an epistemic community.

On personalisation and objectivity

The crux of Simpson’s article is that personalisation is bad because it breaches objectivity – a criteria against which search engines should be judged. I have raised above one objection to the issue of objectivity. I think there’s also an issue regarding what ‘objective’ means – particularly given the use of a broadly pragmatist epistemology (which I take social epistemology to be), it seems odd to think about objectivity outside of the context of use, and for some uses personalisation may be important and indeed the only way to make sense of information, while for others it might be rather more pernicious. Here I raise some more issues in the specific context of personalisation.

Geolocation and (good) personalisation – the redundancy of ‘nearby’

Context sensitive points at which when we say “is there a restaurant” the “!nearby” is almost redundant – it is entirely sensible for search engines to do the same thing. That is completely within what we would understand by ordinary testimony, but still involves personalisation. This isn’t an issue of “find me the nearest expert” – because the web makes that somewhat redundant – rather it’s an issue of “find me the most relevant expert”; and that just happens to be regarding nearby restaurants.

Geolocation and (good) personalisation – understanding local customs, and requirements for deep/shallow information

Two people search for things in two different countries, we don’t need to imagine a benign dictator (or brainwashed populace) to think that there might be normative reasons why that population would be searching for a different ‘angle’ on the topic to the international population. For example, particularly religious or (perhaps less controversially) cultural practices of a fairly benign but ‘unusual’ nature (a festival or something). A local search engine could do the job, google needs to personalise to do so. This seems intuitively appropriate. In fact, the exact same information could be presented both to a ‘local’ and ‘non-local’, but with locals receiving results which gave more detail – including but not limited to, geographic information, local websites regarding upcoming events, and so on. Again, this is in line with testimonial knowledge – a search engine might direct someone to me to give a novice an overview of some topic, while sending me to some other website. This of course hints at another facet of search personalisation – expertise might matter, informants that do not take into account the capabilities of their audience to understand their testimony fail to give knowledge in their testimonial role.

Geolocation and (bad) personalisation – living with a racist

We can also imagine a context situation in which two neighbours get two different sets of results, through no impact of their own behaviours (perhaps one of them has a racist housemate and the other doesn’t). In all other ways, the two users are the same. Let’s say they have no knowledge of some civil rights movement figure, but there are a number of websites on that figure including some run by white supremacist groups (as is the case for Martin Luther King). We don’t have to imagine the 50/50 division of results described in 4. above to see the concern of objectivity here. Nor do we need to imagine that the searchers have made different searches on this occasion; both have used the same query, but one has received results from across the web, while the other is receiving a results set which is skewed towards the subset of biased (racist, etc.) results. We would hope both users would exercise their epistemic abilities to make judgements on the information found. However, in this case the concern is not only with the individual searcher – although the search engine could do more to help them – it is with the personalisation on which the results were returned, and the appropriateness of customising results for that individual.

Geolocation and (bad) personalisation – group dominance

My understanding of Google’s search in China is that, what they were doing was filtering out search results which those within the Great Firewall would not have been able to access. That is, they were not acting as a filter of themselves, but rather removing results which had already been vetoed by the Chinese Government. (I may be wrong about that – do correct me if I am). We can imagine a case such as this, or another in which the dominant group opens particular results more often, and makes particular searches more often (ones which are close enough that they’d influence returned results), and that these groups are tied to some particular geographic location such that a search engine can personalise results based on this data. In both these cases, the concern is that rather than pagerank or ‘link juice’ or whatever other measure which is designed to take account of the broad epistemic environment, the results are biased towards a particular subset of pages with an epistemic perspective while elsewhere (globally) the full set of results is returned. Further force is added to the example if we imagine an individual in such a country who is attempting to find information on the ‘other side’ – but cannot, due to an imposed personalisation. The knowledge terrain would appear very different to such a searcher, despite their own epistemic virtue. Such an example, however, simply extends the issue – even in a location full of ‘epistemic devils’ search engines should properly be judged if they provide results that fail on some measure of ‘objectivity’, limiting their indications of ‘good informants’ to only a biased subset.

Recall and Objectivity

If we recall Simpson’s criteria for assessment of search engines (as highlighted above):

1. precision and recall, where precision is a measure of relevance of recalled documents (relevant:irrelevant) and recall is a measure of completeness of the set (relevant^recalled:relevant^ontheweb) (p.431
2. ‘timeliness’ – the duration it takes for searchers to find a relevant link (thus, if the first result is relevant, this will give the best score) (p.432)
3. ‘authority prioritisation’ – they should prioritise those sources which are credible. This could be assessed in the same way as timeliness with relevance replaced by reliability (p.433). Computational markers for such ranking are challenging to achieve. I would suggest that ‘link is in part to measure this quality.
4. Objectivity – “a search engine’s results are objective when their rank ordering represents a defensible judgement about the relative relevance of available online reports”, thus, if there are 2 sides to a story with an equal quantity of ‘hits’ behind them, ordering such that the first 50% regard one side, and the latter 50% the other lacks objectivity.

One outcome of the preceding argument is, I think, that objectivity – while a useful summary concept – is in fact entailed in the first three. This is because as I have framed it, the concern with search engine personalisation is that they fail with regard to ‘recall’ (they ignore relevant results) as long as ‘authority prioritisation’ and ‘timeliness’ hold. That is, either they fail to return relevant results, or if they do, they are not defensibly ranked such that authority and timeliness hold true – in particular that of ‘authority’ on which the epistemic qualities of the searching agent have little bearing. There are issues related to the presence of ‘poor’ information on the internet, but the epistemic community – which search engines ‘survey’ when they crawl – acts to address these, and does so rather effectively such that blips in search engine informativeness regarding good sources for testimony, are just that – blips. This is not incompatible with their status as objective informants regarding good sources of information, human informants would be in the same position. Furthermore, we expect good informants to be prepared to tell us information they may not agree with, many a courtroom drama is predicated on just such as assumption. The issues of relevance, timeliness (not ‘hiding away’ information in that case), and authority (the credibility of results) are key here too – where testimony is contextualised (but this is not the place to discuss this analogy further/I have no time to right now!).

Summary

I have presented some arguments for personalisation using ordinary standards of testimony, and some against, based on geolocation (although most could be adapted to other features of personalisation).

My suggestion is that it is not the case that personalisation is bad qua unobjective, but that, when giving an objective judgement of testimony – and when making judgements on the likelihood of someone elses testimony meeting your information needs – we expect informants to tell us the substantive assumptions they have made to meet their conclusions. Search engines often fail to do this, except where there is good (often advertising based) reason for them to do so (clarifying geolocation, for example). Furthermore, where these assumptions are explicit, the impact of them is often not made clear.

Suggestions

In so far as I think personalisation is often useful, I think it should remain. However, there are some considerations:

1. Rather than keeping implicit personalisation facets, they should be made clear – perhaps as added terms in a search query (this would work, for example, for restaurant searches which could add postcodes to queries)
2. Suggested search features sometimes include elements of such alteration – highlighting ‘deeper’ queries (adding key words) or broader queries (removing query terms). The appearance of multimedia in the main SERP probably helps here too.
3. Features to indicate why personalisation has occurred might be useful (although, of course this is then open to gaming). It is hard to see how this could be done without “we selected this result because based on your previous searches, you’re a racist” or “you’re a climate change denier”, etc. being returned…
4. The things we search for are likely to contain epistemic bias (indeed, part of my research interest is on this topic!) which search engines in their current state may not be able to deal with, and which it may not be their place to do so in their role as surrogate experts. For example a search for “Al Gore inconvenient truth” is likely to return rather different results than a search for “Al Gore liar” – this is about the epistemic judgement of searchers in their query formation, not personalisation. Subsequent results may be personalised off the back of such searches (and this may be problematic as discussed above), but in the first instance this is not the concern.
5. Search engines that use a sort of ‘faceted search’ in which ‘takes’ on concepts are classified such that for a given concept ‘x’ pages which relate to one definition might appear together, while an opposing definition might appear separately. Facets could be added for location, difficulty, and so on. Some of this is already implemented. Some of it is implicit – but should perhaps not be.

Based on ’3′ above, we might argue – as I have indicated in a number of places above – that search engines should not be considered as informants, but as second order informants – informants that they know the answer (as Simpson also indicates). In this case, a significant component of their behaviour should be oriented to covering the web, and avoiding presenting subsets unless there are good reasons for personalisation – which should be made explicit, as we would expect in cases of testimonial knowledge. In some cases, personalisation is the action of a good informant (unless the question is “know of any good restaurants? – oh, but I’m going to Birmingham tonight”), in many such assumptions should be made clear, perhaps by ’5′. Removing the option reduces the quality of the search engine as an epistemic tool. In making the tool a good epistemic tool, unfortunately, bad epistemic agents may still use information poorly; but this is already the case. Agents who chose to bias their results already do so through their queries, and the sites they select. Search engines are not in a position to assess the epistemic agents who use them, but they able to position themselves as good epistemic tools, ones that survey the epistemic landscape, and attempt to avoid undue assumption – that is the role of the good informant.

I think, then, that I’m making some key statements here:

1. Personalisation sometimes makes sense
2. There are two issues of objectivity – one regards the recall, authority, and timeliness (and precision possibly) of results in SERPs, the other is to do with the epistemic community
3. Objectivity of SERPs and of the epistemic community (including the searching agent) should not be conflated, Simpson’s analysis of objectivity and his definition lends itself to conflation. Objectivity for search engines is (probably) entailed in their recall, authority and timeliness (2. above).
4. Search engines could do more to make it clear the assumptions they make when personalising results

In my recent blog post I explained the politics of autocomplete, a feature that suggests queries while they are being typed. We may wonder how this is affected by the trend of creating tailor-made search engine results for specific audiences. How do Google´s suggestions differ from country to country (and language to language)?

Methodology and research question

I tried to gain insights into this question during a small project at the summer school of the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) this year. With a tool provided by the Digital Methods team I was able to conduct a limited cross-cultural comparison for the query “9/11”. On July 4^th and 5^th 2012, I crawled the query in 4 languages (English, Arabic, Hebrew, German) in 12 country versions (Australia, Canada, UK, US, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories, Iraq, Israel, Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Before I noticed that Google ranked websites with alternative accounts of 9/11 (commonly described as “conspiracy theories”) fairly high (see my post here). Thus, I wanted to know whether this is also reflected in the autocomplete suggestions and if there are differences between the language versions. While the used tool is very helpful to retrieve the suggestions, it does not provide any help for interpreting them. The output comes in form of numerous tables, simply listing the suggestions in the order of their appearance in Google, together with some additional information (see below). Google´s API allows for retrieving ten results (the suggestions have partly been limited to four in the regular search interface).

Output of the DMI autocomplete tool

To interpret this vast amount of data, I categorized each suggestion with Grounded Theory oriented content analysis. That means these categories resulted from the data itself, rather than forcing them onto the data before analysis. The outcome is eight categories which helped to structure the data.

Categories for the suggestions

To get a summarizing overview of all the data, I created a word cloud (with Wordle) which shows all the suggestions in relation to their frequency (the bigger the word, the more often it appeared in the suggestions) and in the color of the categories. The rare cases of suggestions in non-Latin script (Arabic/Hebrew) were translated into English and brackets indicating the original script were added.

Results

The word cloud immediately reveals a striking result: Google´s suggestions for 9/11 over-represent alternative accounts of the event, most notably the word “conspiracy” which was suggested most often. Additionally, a number of “conspiracy-related” queries appear, for example, “truth” (pointing to the so-called “9/11 truth movement” which advocates alternative accounts) or the catch phrase “[was an] inside job”.

Overview: Word cloud of all suggestions

On the contrary, only few suggestions refer to the mainstream account or “neutral” facts. Another frequently suggested term is “memorial”, probably pointing to the 9/11 memorial museum in New York City. Less visible, but also striking are the rare suggestions of queries which are not related to September 11, 2001. These are more common in the Arabic countries, for example in regard to a section in the Quran. The following tables show the categorized results for all the analyzed language and country versions.

Google´s suggestions for the query “9/11″ in English

Google´s suggestions for the query “9/11″ in German

Google´s suggestions for the query “9/11″ in Hebrew

Google´s suggestions for the query “9/11″ in Arabic

The following figure shows only the categories but gives a better overview for direct comparison.

Categorized suggestions in comparison

The differences across the language versions are significant, especially between the Arabic and the Western countries, while there are only slight variations between countries with the same language version. Alternative accounts seem to play a major role in the Arab world, followed by German-speaking countries, Hebrew and finally the English-speaking countries. The latter ones apparently have a more heterogeneous interest in 9/11, including jokes which otherwise only appear in Hebrew but in none of the Arabic or German language versions. In all Western countries “memorial” is the most popular query, whereas all Arabic countries suggest the slogan “was an inside job” first.

Discussion

Google´s suggestions for the query “9/11” dominantly associate it with the events of September 11, 2001. Given the massive global impact of this incident this was expectable, although we can think of other meanings for this query (for example the car Porsche 911, other events on September 11 or the emergency number). The general popularity of alternative accounts is striking. The observation that they are particularly relevant in the Arabic world is supported by a representative study which showed that many people in the Arabic world see other forces behind 9/11 than Al Qaeda. However, we must be careful when we draw conclusions about a society´s opinion based on Google´s suggestions. First of all, we cannot be sure if they really represent what users actually search for, although that´s what Google claims. Secondly, even if autocomplete represents previous queries, they give us only insights into a very specific part of a population, namely those who actively search for the term “9/11” with Google. This also implies a certain language bias. Although the term 9/11 is also commonly related to the September 11 attacks in non-English countries, it is still mostly used in English queries. Only in the German-speaking countries we find combinations where 9/11 is paired with a local expression and related to the incident (e.g. “9/11 wahrheit”, “9/11 ablauf”). Therefore, it might be useful to conduct comparative studies with queries in the local language.

Still, these results give interesting insights into the local differences of Google´s search engine. They show that the autocomplete suggestions vary significantly between language versions but rather slightly between countries within one language.

In September 2010 Google introduced autocomplete (also Google Suggest) to its search engine. Based on previous queries, it tries to predict what we want to search for while we are still typing. How does this impact search engine usage and what to do the suggested queries tell us about our societies? Already now it is clear that the suggestions are often problematic. They may violate personal rights and can be politically-loaded and controversial.

Trials against Google

As I briefly pointed out in my last blog post, Bettina Wulff (Germany´s former first lady) recently sued Google because its autocomplete feature supported the rumor that she worked as a prostitute. She was not the first one who saw her personal rights violated by Google´s suggestions. Earlier this year, a Japanese man fight and won a law case against the search engine provider because it affiliated his name to criminal acts. He was afraid that Google´s suggestions could damage his reputation and might cost him his job. In 2011 Google lost another law suit fought by an Italian business man who did not want to be associated with suggestions like “truffa” (fraud), similar to another case in France. In Ireland a legal settlement solved the conflict between Google and a hotel which did not like Google´s suggestion “receivership” next to its name. The courts worldwide seem to be rather on the complainants´ side than on Google´s. While most will agree that false allegations should not be supported by search engines we may also ask: what if they are correct? Where do personal rights end and where does manipulation begin?

Censorship and manipulation

Google usually argues that its algorithms simply mirror the web and that autocomplete is just based on previous queries. However, the company also declares it applies “a narrow set of removal policies for pornography, violence, hate speech, and terms that are frequently used to find content that infringes copyrights.” At least in some cases it is debatable what should fall under this category. For example, Emil Protalinski has pointed out that censoring “thepiratebay” was not justified because the platform also provides legitimate torrent links and not only pirated material.

In any case, this relatively new feature is another powerful way of influencing our information practices. Although it comes in the subtle shape of mere suggestions it may have massive impact on users´ search behavior. It disciplines us. We get rewarded if we follow the suggestions because they make us type less. Are we also going to feel bad if we search for something which does not appear here, knowing it might be illegal or at least a query on the margin of society?

Search engine optimizers have already acknowledged the power of autocomplete. They try to polish the images of brands by highlighting “the positive aspects or activities associated with the brand and push negative values out” (Brian Patterson 2012).

Search engine optimizers try to manipulate Google´s suggestions.

Image by Search Engine Land (2012)

Cultural impact

Such manipulations question the alleged democratic principle of autocomplete. Do the suggestions really represent what people search for? Even if they do, we may question the “wisdom of crowds” (Surowiecki) as masses have always had the potential to turn into mobs. Can autocomplete foster prejudices by re-producing them with its suggestions? Does it manipulate the public similar as big tabloids do, as Krystian Woznicki wonders? Romanians, for example, were confronted with not very flattering predictions for the query “Romanians are”: “scum”, “ugly”, “rude” were among Google´s associations. A campaign tried to change this by asking users to google for positive attributes like “Romanians are smart”. Try yourself if it was successful (at my computer in the Netherlands it doesn´t seem so).

I would love to hear more about your experience (maybe even research?) on autocomplete. What do the suggestions tell us about our societies and how can we use them for social research? Soon, I´m going to write more about a cross-cultural comparison of autocomplete suggestions here.

Stay tuned!

The website searchengineland.com featured a live blog coverage of the interview with Dylan Casey, Search Product Manager at Google from the TWTRCON – a one-day conference focusing entirely on the business use of Twitter, held on 14 June 2010.

In brief, Google launched the Real Time search last December, a feature that shows results based on whether there is a real time component to the queries made on a particular topic. This can be done by clicking on the Latest tab on the search results page. Results displayed include twitter tweets, Google news, blog search, Facebook Fan page updates, etc. Since April 2010, another feature was the inclusion of top links on the result page: a section that displayed the more ‘authoritative and popular stories’ on the query. More links to background readings are present in the article itself.

Questions to Dylan were mostly to do with the developments of Google’s real time search function and the way it was reacting to the integration of News results and Facebook  results, and more so, the ramifications of real time results on the way ‘ searching’ was going to develop.

While he discussed some features of the real time search that Google will focus on: namely frequency and quality (for example: retweets in the case of twitter posts), and that there will be no connection between paid and unpaid searches (paid results will remain unchanged in natural search irrespective of surge in real time search results), the most interesting remarks from Dylan were that the opening up of the web is better for everyone and that instantaneous updates made content more relevant for its consumers.Two of the most interesting comments were on the way content publishing and the notion of privacy in content was to change with ‘real time search’:

One of the benefits is not only people will think they can come to Google and get the right answer if they hear an explosion or see a rally but also it will change the way that people will publish. That if I’m making this [real time] content available, it will be useful.”

The more open the web is the better, not just for Google but for everyone. Flip side is that the content previously thought of as private needs to be increasingly careful on how we manage it.

These comments very much highlight the dissonance between public and private nature of information that recent concerns over  Google Buzz has also generated. The question rather, is that should user published content be made searchable and catalogued on a large Search engine platform.

Whilst concluding with a response to an audience query on the physiology of the real time search, Dylan added that there was still a long way to go with real time search, and that it  was progressing in the direction of  “work to innovate.” He adds, ” It’s just like search. We haven’t solved it yet.”

Since Google shut down its mainland Chinese-language portal Google.cn on March 23 and has started rerouting searches through its acclaimed uncensored Hong Kong site, reports on the move have varied in tone from appraisal (Google defying the censorship and bullying of the Chinese government) to a fair amount of skepticism (Google relocating to Hong Kong is above all a business move).

German weekly Spiegel Online termed Google’s move to Hong Kong ‘A Face-Saving Capitulation’, a sentiment Spiegel claims is shared by the better part of Germany’s leading newspapers as it quotes Die Tageszeitung, Financial Times Deutschland, Die Welt and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Google’s move was a far cry from abandoning the Chinese market altogether, but still allowed the company to fulfill its promise of ending self-censorship in China. But Chinese authorities have reacted angrily. The government on Tuesday issued a statement calling the move “totally wrong.” And a commentary in the overseas edition of the leading Chinese Communist Party newspaper ratcheted up the rancor even more on Wednesday. It accused Google of “cooperation and collusion with the US intelligence and security agencies” and being part of the “United States’ big efforts in recent years to engage in Internet war,” according to Reuters. The front-page commentary went on to say that:
“For Chinese people, Google is not god, and even if it puts on a full-on show about politics and values, it is still not god.”
It is a sentiment with which many in Germany would agree. Indeed, in Wednesday’s newspapers, German commentators weren’t very interested in Google’s spin on the move. Instead, they attributed it to business logic rather than principle, saw it as merely a “face-saving capitulation,” warned people away from seeing the fight as a David-vs-Goliath-like match-up and even imagined it as the welcome dawning of the post-Google world.

Furthermore, Spiegel mentions that the shutdown of Google.cn may be a loss to some users in China (e.g. Gmail accounts were less prone to snooping than were state providers), but that it is hardly a tragedy. China’s tech-savvy netizens have long been used to censorship and have already found their ways around the barriers. A March 23 blogpost on the digital activism blog digiactive.org raises some interesting points as to the importance of Google’s move to Mainland Chinese netizens. In the post, entitled ‘Google’s Stand on Uncensored Search: Irrelevant to China’s Internet Experience’, the author (and resident of Mainland China) gives four reasons why he feels the recent fuss over uncensored search results is irrelevant:

1. Censorship isn’t News: Anyone in China scouring the internet for politically sensitive content that might have been snuffed out by Google.cn’s filters already has no illusions about how manipulative, hypocritical, and controlling China’s internet authorities are–not to mention China’s entire government. In other words, they aren’t anywhere near getting duped into believing China’s official “Harmonious Society” tag line just because several items are missing from their Google search.
2. Circumvention Options Already Exist: Anyone in China who is genuinely serious about uncovered all of their missing content and actually being able to access it once they find it on their search engine of choice has options. For anywhere from USD $8-15 per month, VPN (virtual private network) software is available for subscription, which instantly unblocks all search results and real content in China.
3. There are Already Pockets of Free Speech on the Chinese Web: I don’t think Google.com or Google.cn were ever confused as a platform for political change in China. While I do applaud Google’s ethos of free information for everyone, people in China have many other places to go if they actually want to exchange politically sensitive ideas. Just take a look at Kaixin001.com! Here is an unblocked, easily accessible website on which hundreds or thousands or articles, videos, and photos are exchanged daily across China. Some articles are amusing distractions or mindless celebrity gossip, but many others are full of highly “controversial” content that blisteringly excoriates China’s government policies and the gaping holes in the face of its “Harmonious Society.”
4. Google.cn Wasn’t an Effective Block: To Google: For all of those politically active Chinese-only speakers whom you thought desperately need your Google.cn service in order to exchange information freely, don’t worry, there are plenty of other channels that were always much more popular anyway. Does Google really believe that Chinese people with the motivation to seek out a free version of the internet and access uncensored ideas will be deterred because Google.cn had some missing results to content that they wouldn’t have been able to view anyway?

Read the full articles on digiactive.org and Spiegel Online.

The essay Critical Masses, Commerce, and Shifting State-Society Relations in China, recently published on The China Beat blog, is based on the script of a talk that Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York Ying Zhu gave at Google’s New York offices on February 12, 2010. In her talk, Zhu focused on Google’s precarious relationship with China, but also on the reception of James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ in Chinese theaters in order to investigate the concept of China’s emerging “critical masses” as constitutive of a quasi-public sphere invested with people power. Announcing Zhu’s talk in early February, the China Beat states:

No longer isolated, nameless masses, today’s Chinese audiences and social media users are critical masses: “critical” to the tenure of a one-party state that is no longer in a position to easily put down a popular rebellion; “critical” in the sense that they identify problems and demand, and indeed shape, state action; and “critical” in the sense that they constitute ready networks of audience members and information consumers with the potential to be moved to collective action by a catalyzing event or issue that transforms passive association into active participation in a critical mass of like-minded citizens expressing their passion in forums ranging from online debates to street-level demonstrations or even extended political or cultural campaigns. Zhu argues that media-centered critical masses are a central dynamic of China’s changing state-society relationship. Additionally, she suggests that this emerging dynamic is not limited to China, and identifies points of convergence between China and the West in politics and political participation. She proposes that the electoral politics of established democracies and the regime-sustaining politics of authoritarian states alike are trending toward a quasi-democratic “politics with globalized characteristics,” with important prospects and problems in common.

In addition to Zhu’s talk at Google, the follow-up essay features added sections by Ying Zhu and Bruce Robinson meant to tease out the issues that were left without further elaboration due to time constraints.

On monday March 1, Dutch newspaper NRC Next devoted two pages to articles on Google. One article by Peter Teffer, ”Maakt het internet ons dommer?” (does the Internet dumb us down?) features an interview with Geert Lovink. The other article is an experiment by two NRC reporters, Teffer and Pfauth, who attempted to live and work without the use of any Google service for a week. The article and report (both in Dutch) are online here.

In the last week of January, an NYU graduate class conducted a similar experiment, see an earlier blog post on it here.

NYU professor Mushon Zer Aviv and his graduate class in (new) Media (networked) Culture and (distributed) Communication met quite a challenge this past week as the class assignment was to live and work for a full week without using any Google service. Read about the assignment, the rules and the outcomes on http://cultureandcommunication.org/tdm/s10/admin/a-week-without-google/, and be sure to check the comments.

Michael Stevenson is a lecturer and PhD candidate at the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam. For the Society of the Query evening program he presented a very interesting selection of artistic and activist projects that were engaged with (the re-attribution of) different elements related to Web search.

Query

The IP-Browser (Govcom.org) for instance played with the linearity of querying the Web. It creates an alternative browsing experience that foregrounds the Web’s machine habitat and returns the user back to the basics of orderly Web browsing. The IP Browser looks up your IP address, and allows you to browse the Websites in your IP neighborhood, one by one in the order in which they are given in the IP address space.

Shmoogle (Tsila Hassine/De Geuzen) also deals with linearity on the Web, specifically the linearity of the search returns of Google. De Geuzen state that the best search returns that Google offers are not necessarily always the ones at the top. Unfortunately this is where the average Google user gets stuck. Shmoogle offers a way to find the search results in a chaotic way, and in doing so it ensures greater democracy.

The Internet Says No (Constant Dullaart) is a animated, fully functioning Google page (Google is placed in a marquee-frame). this work offers a pessimistic way to surf the internet.

The Misspelling-Generator (Linda Hilfling & Erik Borra). Erik Borra presented the work as a result of the fight against internet censorship. When doing a search in the Chinese version of Google on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Linda Hilfling discovered a temporary loophole out of the Google self-censorship in China. By deliberately spelling Tiananmen incorrectly, she was taken to web-pages where other people had misspelled Tiananmen, and was thereby able to access pictures of demonstrations as well as the legendary image of the student in front of the tank through the sources of incorrect spellings. The Misspelling generator is a tool that can be used for internet activism. By writing variations like ‘tianamen’ and ‘tiananman’ the isolation politics of the Google’s spelling corrector can be subverted while Google’ selfcensorship can be circumvented.

Images

Z.A.P. (ApFab) is an automatic image generation installation. First you add a word using the ApFab touch-screen, then the ZapMachine will grab an image from the Internet. This image is the most important visual representation of that word, at that time, according to the current Internet authority Google. Finally, the individual images are incorporated into a new context, creating a new tense state of meaning and random relations. With “Zapmachine: Who gave you the right?” AbFab is asking the following questions:

-How much control do we have over the generated collage as artists?
-How much influence do you have on this process.
-How does the collage relate to the initial intention by which the image was uploaded on the Internet by the original author?
-Who is the author of this Zap collage?

Disease Disco (Constant Dullaart) “To every suffering its thumbnail”. Dullaart used the Google image search by color option, to query the word ‘disease’ and changes color ‘rhytmically’. The work is accompanied by the US billboard #1 hit song of the moment that the work was created.

The Global Anxiety Monitor (De Geuzen) uses html-frames to display automated image searches in different languages. Searching in Google for terms such as conflict, terrorism and climate change, this monitor traces the ebb and flow of fear in Arabic, Hebrew, English and Dutch.

Terms & Conditions

Cookie Monster (Andrea Fiore) To capture on-line behavior, thousands of HTTP cookies are sent daily to web browsers to identify users and gather statistical knowledge about tastes and habits. The cookie consensus website hosts a collection of cookies that Andrea Fiore received while surfing through the first 50 entries of the Alexa directory of News sites. In the future it will also host a software that will give the users the capability to create their own cookie collections.

I Love Alaska (Lernert Engelberts & Sander Plug) is a beautifully framed internet movie series that tells the story of a middle aged woman living in Houston, Texas. The viewer follows her AOL search queries over the time span of months. “In the end, when she cheats on her husband with a man she met online, her life seems to crumble around her. She regrets her deceit, admits to her Internet addiction and dreams of a new life in Alaska.”

Flarf poetry can be characterized as an avant-garde poetry movement of the late 20th and the early 21st century. In flarf poetry a poet roams the Internet using random word searches, to distill newly created phrases and bizarre constructions that he later shares with the flarf community.

Flarf poetry can be described as a ‘readymade’, collage technique that has connections to the Surrealists in the 20s and William Burroughs cut-up technique from 1959. Flarf itself exists for a decade and has since then evolved by using web poetry generators and chatbots like Jabberwacky.

Ton van het Hof showed an example of flarf by Sharen Mesmer: “A knowing diabetic bitch”

This is my Readymade Flarf poem using Jabberwacky:

What is Flarf? The greatest two dimensional thing in the world. What is Flarf? A Flatland. It’s a satire on this one.

Although my self made poem doesn’t show this so well (I am unfortunately an amateur flarf poet), flarf poems are often as disturbing as they are hilarious, which have made many people question if flarf will can ever be taken serious. Even though this question is still a valid question today, the movement is showing signs to have cleared a spot amongst the ranks of the legitimate art forms, finding its ways to blogs, magazines and conferences.