along the top of each search results page, such as “Results 1–10 of about 481,000,000 for God.” The sense of precision derives from the short list of ten results returned on the first page.
Users thus believe that Google’s rankings are honest expressions of probable importance and relevance. They demonstrate a “trust bias” when selecting one of these links to click: they inherently trust Google’s algorithmic judgment about which links are appropriate for them.15 This trust bias is reinforced by the fact that most people who use Google do so in a very unsophisticated way while nonetheless expressing a high level of confidence about their own skills at navigating a search system.16
Whether or not users know the company’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” this trust bias reflects a faith, avowed or latent, in Google’s corporate ethos. I examine this faith at greater length in the next chapter. Users believe in Google’s honesty regardless of whether they understand the way its core algorithm, PageRank, chooses what to display and how to rank links. Users trust Google to make choices for them, or at least to guide them toward a few choices that attract the most attention.17 Needless to say, appearing on the first page of results is of paramount importance for firms competing for attention and sales.18
Despite a shallow understanding of how search engines work, Web users express deep satisfaction with them. Only 19 percent express a lack of trust in search engines. More than 68 percent of Web search users report that they consider search engines to be fair and unbiased. About 44 percent of those surveyed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2005 said they use only one search engine, and 48 percent use only two or three. Only 38 percent said they were aware of the distinction between the sponsored advertising links that Google and other search services offer and the algorithmically generated “organic” results that dominate the page. Only one in six search users could testify that they can always tell the difference between the sponsored links and the generated results.19
Thus Google is inherently conservative in its effects on the information world: winners keep winning, unless Google changes the rules of the system or intervenes with human judgment.20 By favoring the majority or the consensus among search sites, Google Web Search results also favor the comfortable middle ground of controversial subjects.21
THE PRAGMATIC THEORY OF SEARCH
Our trust in Google is pragmatic in more than just the ordinary sense of the term, however. We believe that a consensus about what’s important, arrived at by apparently democratic means, is probably trustworthy. Google’s method of relying on the collective and active judgment of millions of Web users seems in the abstract to realize one of the most influential theories of epistemology: American pragmatism. As Charles Sanders Peirce and William James developed it in the 1890s and Richard Rorty refined it almost century later, the pragmatic theory of truth states that truth is generated through a process of experimentation, discovery, feedback, and consensus.22 The true statement is therefore one that works in the world, James would say. It conforms to experience and observation, yet is under constant pressure of revision, as Peirce explained.23 Truth is not attached to a thing in the world per se, but to our experiences of that thing and to our conversation about and collective understanding of it. People and peoples can disagree over what is true, and that disagreement is a part of the process of lurching toward truth.
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