culture and an influence on global culture.
LIFE BEFORE GOOGLE
Google may be sui generis, but before Google, a number of search engines competed for business in the field. Each of them conducted indexing and searching a bit differently. Like Google, they all originated from a rich academic field devoted to information coding and retrieval, one that lies at the intersection of computer science, linguistics, and library and information studies. It remains an exciting intellectual field. But the late-1990s market gurus of Silicon Valley did not necessarily see search as the key to riches. They saw it as an ancillary feature designed to hold customers’ attention, along with all the other services and content that crowded pages such as Yahoo and Excite.6 Early news coverage of Google generally folded the company in with other search companies launched around the same time. Rarely did a technology or business journalist declare that there was anything remarkable or distinct about Google, even though the simple act of using it demonstrated Google’s superiority almost instantly.
Business Week first took note of Google in September 1998. In a brief entry about how search engines work and the challenge of assessing the quality of their results, its editors wrote: “There’s another ranking system that may be even better for managers. Google (http://google.stanford.edu/) rates Web sites by the number of other sites linked to them. The rankings, in other words, are determined not by surfers, but by Webmasters who presumably took time to evaluate a site before setting up a link to it. It’s an adaptation of the time-honored practice of assessing scientific papers by the number of citations they’ve gotten in other papers.”7
It’s notable that the link to Google given in that article was within the Stanford University computer system. This is the earliest reference I could find to the search engine that ten years later would dominate the Web experience in most of the world. The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand, mentioned Google as a new idea for Web search in December 1998. By then, the URL already stood alone as www.google.com.8 USA Today also listed Google in a brief about interesting websites in December 1998.9 Business and computer publications with specialized circulations started mentioning Google in mid-1999. The New York Times apparently did not consider Google important enough to write about until its columnist Max Frankel mentioned Google among a list of search engines in November 1999.10
The first serious consideration of Google by the New York Times, the leading American newspaper, was a de facto endorsement by the technology writer Peter Lewis in September 1999. “Until recently my favorite search engines were Hotbot (www.hotbot.com) and Alta Vista (www.altavista.com),” Lewis wrote. “Hotbot is useful for finding popular Web sites, and AltaVista is good at ferreting out obscure information. Alta Vista in particular returns a bazillion potential hits when it is asked to scour the Net for a word or phrase. But the larger the World Wide Web becomes, the more important it becomes for search engines to return fewer results, not more. Few people have time to click through 70,482 query matches hoping that the one they want, the most relevant one, is in there somewhere. The engines not only have to be smarter, but also faster.” Lewis noted that “several search engines introduced recently deserve serious consideration, including the revamped version of MSN.com Search (msn.com), introduced by the Microsoft Network last week, and AOL.com Search (aol.com), to be introduced by America Online next week. But if you are searching for the next generation in search technologies, look for Gurunet and Google.”11
Gurunet did not last long after Lewis wrote about it, and he offered only qualified interest in its methods. He was smitten with Google, however. At the moment when the president of the United States was enmeshed in a tawdry scandal involving sex with a White House intern, Lewis found that Google filtered for relevance effectively enough to avoid pornographic sites when searching for terms such as “Bill Clinton” and, more important, “sex.” As Lewis wrote,
What Google does do, however, is to come up with a list that starts with a guide to marriage and sex, not the long string of pornographic sites that would pop up in the search listings of most other engines. Many disreputable Web site operators attempt to fool search engines by salting their pages with bogus key words in an attempt to lure unsuspecting users. Google does not ogle. Instead, Google determines the relevance or importance of a page in part by measuring how many other sites have links to it. That technique enables Google to rank even those sites that it has not visited. Many Web sites do not allow search engines to catalogue their content, but they may hold the information a searcher wants.
Unlike other search engines, Lewis wrote, “Google … takes into account the importance, measured in popularity, of the sites that are linking to the page. Links from popular sites are given more weight than links from obscure sites. If a lot of important sites establish links with the page, the reasoning goes, it must be important too. It is the cyber-age variant on the common wisdom that the best roadside diners are the ones with all the big trucks parked outside.” Once the New York Times parked its truck outside Google and explained the virtues of PageRank to the elites of America, it was impossible to stop Google’s proliferation.12
Still, through its early years of rapid growth, Google never advertised on television or in standard print media (although it did purchase a gratuitous, albeit clever, advertisement during the Super Bowl in 2010). Its growth in popularity was in part sparked by glowing reviews among technology writers, but the most significant factor in its growth was word-of-mouth recommendation. Most of us discovered Google because it worked for our friends. It took a mess and put it in order. It took a frustrating task and made it simple. And it seemed so unassuming about the whole matter.
This is a story of commercial success rarely seen in business history. The business was all about leveraging technology and science. Those, after all, were what lay behind Google’s mission, however humanistic its statement might be: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The larger question that we need to ponder, however, is why we all welcomed such an enterprise with open arms and why we have unreflectively trusted it with such massive amounts of our personal information and with control over our access to knowledge.
“TRUST BIAS” AND THE PRAGMATISM OF PAGERANK
Questions of trust and control are not merely matters of abstract speculation. The core practices of Google—the massive accumulation of data on consumer and citizen preferences, the ability to accurately and precisely target small advertisements for small services for a small fee billions of times per day, and the appearance of offering access to information for no monetary cost—could soon be dominant modes of information commerce.13 Google has already forced big media companies and mobile-phone services to alter their expectations and services. Soon other companies will no doubt try to mimic Google’s style, philosophy, and moves.14
We trust Google with our personal information and preferences and with our access to knowledge because we trust technology that satisfies our prejudices. We want fast access to relevant and reliable information. Google has ascended to great heights in twelve short years by emphasizing three characteristics of its technology that build trust among users: speed, “precise comprehensiveness,” and honesty. On one level—that of simple practicality—we trust Google because, compared with the alternatives, it indeed works fast, produces information that usually seems relevant, and, as a result, seems trustworthy.
Precise comprehensiveness is the term I give to the list of results that appears to be clear and ranked in order of relevance. If a number of users doing the same search click on
