Our assignment for this blog is to determine whether we should fear Google, and I must say I was blissfully ignorant before the question was posed. In my pre-John Battelle life, I loved Google. Now, after having read The Search, my confidence is shaken (a little). In the first chapter of the book, Battelle sets the stage by painting a foreboding picture of our Google obsession. The idea he presents is that Google is creating a “Database of Intentions,” built from our collective clickstream. Google, he implies, is mining our thoughts to determine by algorithm not just what we are thinking, but what we will think. It’s a scary and well-reasoned point, but the other side of the picture, the less skeptical side, is that Google has helped create the information weltanschung to which we have become accustomed.
I don’t even remember the world before Google. This search engine, and others like it, have made the Internet and Web 2.0 relevant to our lives. It’s unfortunate that the very story that makes that point in the book also tells the tale of how bad a Google-dependent life can be. For small business owners, like Neil Moncrief, whose business models rely on Google bringing them business, Google’s change-without-warning behavior is scary, but for those of us who use Google and rely on it to bring back only links to germane info (let’s face it, Ask or Yahoo would be more popular if their top links were as good as Google’s), we appreciate the never-ending work of Google Engineers.
The privacy concerns raised are real, and no one or organization — not even Google, yet — knows how to deal with it. This is uncharted territory, and a quote from one of our initial readings seems relevant here: “The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.” (Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in Naked Conversations, quoting Walt West). Google’s official blog (thanks Garrett) admits that they are still struggling with the balance.
For now, I’m not rushing down the aisle to recite my vows to the search juggernaut, but I don’t exactly have cold feet.
I am right with you Rosie on this one. I was blissfully unaware of how much power Google has. I guess there are trade-offs to everything and I haven’t quite decided if I think any lines have been crossed yet. But for now, I’ll stick with Gmail and all the other wonderful apps Google has.
[...] I embarked on my journey into this research paper, I started at Google, which probably doesn’t come as a big surprise — Google search term: “marketing.” The first entry in my Google-recommended sites was [...]