users, in line with its mission statement ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Yet its search results, like those of other search engines, come at a cost which threatens trust, not so much in terms of their accuracy, but by their breaching of privacy, which becomes obvious when ads are targeted at users who can hardly miss the way Mickey Mouse or beach holidays follow them around the WWW. To fuel search as a free service, communities have to give up information on their social relations, and to refine the search, individuals have to give up data about themselves in order to be profiled – to be identified as the same as or different from other individuals. All this raises issues of privacy and of how search engines manage to retain trust.
Following the digital economic practice of search through three different perspectives – users, advertisers and search engine companies – has offered a clear view of what is probably the greatest money-gushing land grab, oil boom and gold rush of the twenty-first century: reading communities to target ads. The billions of dollars in profit are evidence of this. Behind this practice lies the intersection of three dynamics – community, trust and privacy/surveillance – that together make up an abstract diagram of the digital economic practice of search. But this is only one such practice, and further examples will help complicate and extend our understanding of the digital economy.
Notes
1 Technically, these figures are from Alphabet Inc., the conglomerate that controls Google and a number of other businesses. As Google is the largest of the companies in Alphabet I will avoid the distraction of referring to Alphabet and refer to the whole conglomeration as Google. 2 At the time of writing, Google was undergoing an internal controversy over creating a China-specific search engine that some employees objected to as they believed it would enable spying and censorship (Mayer 2018).
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