Ken Auletta - Googled - The End of the World as We Know It

Of course, Calacanis himself might not be a contender. Perhaps a challenge will come from Wolfram Alpha, which was launched in May 2009 and does not search the Web or rely on experts but instead relies on databases to provide answers and offers additional links on the side of the search results. Unlike Google, these vertical search engines do not offer a universal search, which raises this question: how does a user anticipate which subjects are covered in the vertical search index? To date, with exceptions such as Expedia.com for travel, Monster.com for job searches, and HomeAway.com for vacation retreats, vertical searches have not thrived. And as Google moves toward better comprehension of the information users seek, it too will produce fewer and better-honed results. Google will have competition from Microsoft’s renamed and reengineered search engine, Bing, launched in May 2009, which in July 2009 finally succeeded in merging with Yahoo search.

One could argue that the ultimate vertical search would be provided by Artificial Intelligence (AI), computers that could infer what users actually sought. This has always been an obsession of Google’s founders, and they have recruited engineers who specialize in AI. The term is sometimes used synonymously with another, “the semantic Web,” which has long been championed by Tim Berners-Lee. This vision appears to be a long way from becoming real. Craig Silverstein, Google employee number 1, said a thinking machine is probably “hundreds of years away” Marc Andreessen suggests that it is a pipe dream. “We are no closer to a computer that thinks like a person than we were fifty years ago,” he said.

Sometimes lost in the excitement over the wonders of ever more relevant search is the potential social cost. In his provocative book The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr notes that Google’s goal is to store 100 percent of each individual’s data, what Google calls “transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to “choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. “A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr wrote. “They impose homogeneity on the Internet’s wild heterogeneity. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences.” We will narrow our frames of reference, become more polarized in our views, gravitate toward those whose opinions we share, and maybe be less willing to compromise because, he said, the narrow information we receive will magnify our differences, making it harder to reach agreement. Carr also expressed concern that search extracts another toll. “The common term ‘surfing the Web’ perfectly captures the essential superficiality of our relationship with the information we find in such great quantities on the Internet… The most revolutionary consequence of the expansion of the Internet’s power, scope, and usefulness may not be that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to think like computers. Our consciousness will thin out, flatten, as our minds are trained, link by link, to ’DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result.‘ The artificial intelligence we’re creating may turn out to be our own.”

The fear was that Google and its online brethren shortened attention spans and trivialized ideas by simplifying them. This was the thrust a quarter century ago of Neil Postman’s influential book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. He was writing of the public harm when television supplanted print. I can’t suppress a smile when I think how this communications scholar, were he still alive, would react to the Internet, to the thousands and sometimes millions of answers Google offers to a search question, or to an online text-messaging tool like Twitter, with its insistence that no communication be more than 140 characters.

Increasingly, teachers admonish their students that a Google search can be too easy, allowing them to bypass books that broaden the context of their thinking and surprise them with ideas their search words don’t anticipate. Tara Brabazon, a professor of media studies at the University of Brighton, in England, published a book, The University of Google, that caught the attention of the press, in early 2008. Google, she told the Times of London the day before she was to deliver a lecture based on her work, “offers easy answers to difficult questions. But students do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments.” She does not let her first-year students use Google or Wikipedia as research tools because, she warned, “We need to teach our students the interpretive skills first before we teach them the technological skills.” These social costs will matter to the company if they erode the trust Google has earned and if generations of college graduates and their instructors are dubious about Google’s veracity or worth.

The other external threat to Google is government, a threat engineers have difficulty understanding; the Silicon Valley bubble can be as insular as the Beltway’s. Google had fair warning when the Federal Trade Commission held up its DoubleClick acquisition, and when the Justice Department threatened antitrust charges if Google did not relinquish its advertising deal with Yahoo. And these challenges were under the anti-regulatory administration of George W Bush. There is, with merit, a common belief at Google that the administration of Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in the House are more sympathetic to Valley companies and technology issues. Eric Schmidt was an important economic adviser to Obama, and other Google executives, like David Drummond, were early and fervent Obama supporters. But Google would forget at its peril that Democrats traditionally favor more regulation, not less; that Google has made some powerful frenemies that command attention in Washington; and that Google juggles nuclear issues-privacy, concentration of power, copyright-that could explode at any moment. In May 2009, the Obama administration’s new antitrust chief, Christine A. Varney, announced that her department would more rigorously police tech firms like Google.

There are court threats and festering opposition to Google’s Book Search settlement. By the spring of 2009, the settlement was separating Google from members of “the tribe,” as Lawrence Lessig dubs them, who treat openness as a cause and crusade against those who advance their own narrow commercial interests and choke competition. The federal district court judge who must sign off on the agreement between Google and the publishers and the Authors Guild received amicus briefs from various groups asking him to address their antitrust and monopoly concerns. Under the terms of the settlement, Google was granted nearly exclusive rights to millions of “orphaned” books, or those books still under copyright but whose copyright holders are unknown. Because only Google would be granted the right to digitize these books and to sell them, the judge was petitioned to prevent a Google monopoly Librarians expressed concern that Google would monitor reading habits and compile data. Some literary agents protested, as did Charles Nessen and a group of Harvard lawyers, that Google did not have the right to abrogate an orphaned copyright. And with Google effectively locking up the right to digitize all the books ever published, including orphaned books, the claim was that competitors would be shut out. Safeguards were required, they asserted, to ensure that Google would not one day jack up the prices it charges universities and others. The federal judge gave opponents until October 2009 to register their complaints. Seeking to head off growing concerns among libraries, in May 2009 Google reached an agreement with the University of Michigan to grant libraries a say in pricing decisions and to settle disagreements by arbitration, a model it hoped to extend to other libraries. Ominously, the Justice Department also opened an antitrust inquiry. Many who petitioned the court or lobbied Justice acknowledged that Google’s effort to digitize books was salutary. Yet the din grew louder that Google was a mechanized steamroller.