Search Engines Don’t Exist! Stop Calling Them So!
The Bible is a formidable book. Or, rather, a set of books. Even in ages and times when people read it from cover to cover many times, finding a particular phrase or word could be challenging. For us, used to texts in electronic form that can be searched in milliseconds fully automatically, it takes an effort to understand the magnitude of that challenge. However, we may catch a glimpse if we learn that people compiled indices of common words in the Bible by hand — a task usually taking years to complete. Apparently, such painstaking work was worth its while, given the challenge of finding something in the original text. Such an index is usually called a concordance.
The words ‘search engine’ evoke an image of some kind of robot running errands on the internet, somehow quickly reading through all the texts it encounters to retrieve for you those that fit the criteria you entered. Searching is, of course, an active process.
However, this is not how Google or Duck Duck Go work at all.
Instead, these services rely on incredibly large and diverse indices. That is, a firm like Google has compiled an enormous index with references to documents all over the internet. Instead of searching, their service merely looks things up in that index. That is what makes it so fast. No program, no process, could run through the entire world wide web fast enough to answer your questions. Now don’t take me wrong, I do not mean to belittle the technical ingenuity that went into building that service. It is quite amazing, honestly.
So, you may wonder, why is it important to make the distinction between searching and looking up?
Bear with me for a moment. An index is, in its simplest form, a list of terms (words or phrases), and pages (or other location references) to the places where a particular term can be found in the source text. So, if you wanted to know everything said about donkeys in the Bible, you’d find a complete reference in a single spot.
Suppose I wanted to find out about you. I would enter your name in a answer service website’s form and their engine would look up your name as an index term. It then would find a complete dossier on you and it would return that to me. Now I used the word ‘dossier’ intentionally, to evoke associations with Stasi or MI5 or NSA. That’s right, secret services compiling dossiers on people thought to be a danger to society. Google works just like that except that, of course, they don’t necessarily need to think you’re a dangerous person for them to compile a dossier on you. They just do it to everyone. And on everything. That’s their business.
Yet, it doesn’t sound the same, don’t you think? That Google has a dossier on you and hands it over to any person if they ask for it. At least the Secret Services keep their dossiers, well, secret. As a matter of fact, Google isn’t quite as forthcoming as I suggested. They have a lot on you that they don’t return through their anwser service interface just for free. They have it up for sale instead! Now here is where it gets really interesting. All the same, this should be no news to you. You could have known for some years by now, it is no secret.
So why do we continue to call Google’s service a search engine?
I think it is a welcome form of whitewashing, from their point of view. The image of some happy doggy running errands on the internet for you at your bidding is a lot less menacing than that of an organisation that keeps tabs on everyone, compiling dossiers with your every desire if they can get their hands on it. And they claim they can, at least that is what they tell advertisers.
So we should stop calling them ‘a search engine’. It’s part of the frame that prevents us from seeing them for what they are. As they are so secretive about their operation, let’s call them just that: a Secretive Service. Albeit one with a public counter, just for looks.
This is the seventeenth column in a series. The previous one was: New Enclosures. Here is the series introduction.