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.

The Free Art and Technology Lab (F.A.T. Lab) is an organisation aiming to enrich the public domain through the research and development of creative technologies and media. After being nominated for the Transmediale Award 2010, F.A.T. Lab members met up in Berlin in the first week of February and produced a series of projects dedicated to the topic of the week: FUCK GOOGLE. In addition to producing free software, browser addons, live streams, communiques and on-site workshops, F.A.T. Lab built a fake Google Street View car they took to the streets to see what it’s like to be Google. A PDF with building instructions and a list of needed materials has been made available on the F.A.T. website, along with a host of video material. Read about all the week’s projects here.

UPDATE: Also see the collaborative article and interview with F.A.T. Lab’s Evan Roth, by Marcello Lussana and Gaia Novati: http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=384:

“An interesting outsider project at Transmediale.10 this year, was F.A.T
Lab (Free Art and Technology Lab). A collective of artists, engineers,
scientists, lawyers, musicians and trouble-makers who have been working
together for two years, on the intersections of Pop culture and Open
source. Their stapline describes them as “An organization who is
dedicated to enriching the public domain through the research and
development of creative technologies and media.

For Transmediale.10 they presented a project called Fuck Google,
focusing on reminding us all how this big company has become omnipresent
in our digital lives, refering to the risk that too much data is owned
and is going to be owned more and more, just by Google alone. It exists
as a collection of browser add-ons, open source software, theoretical
musings and direct actions.”

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.

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”

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.