Google has accomplished something impressive. It has thousands or millions of people who regularly tell others to use its search engine. They don’t do it because they think it’s better than the alternatives. They don’t do it because they’re paid to. They do it because being an unpaid publicist for Google is a social norm. Want to show you’re smart when someone asks a question? Tell them to “Google” for it. No intelligence required.
Google is far from the only search engine around. Among the alternatives:
- DuckDuckGo: Doesn’t track you!
- Startpage: A privacy-protecting front end to Google.
- Bing: Microsoft’s search engine.
- AOL: Yes, it’s still around.
- Ask.com: Its original idea was that you could phrase searches as questions. That never worked, but it’s still around.
- Yahoo: Any better than Google? At any rate, it’s not Google.
- Baidu: For when you really want China’s Big Brother watching you.
I use a mix of DuckDuckGo and Startpage. DuckDuckGo gives a more complete separation from Google, but its time-range selection is very unreliable. It’s hard to find items just from the last week or last year.
How search engines influence your information
Subtle differences in search results can have big differences. One author noted that searching for “top races Republican” got a suggestion of “top racist Republican.” Searching for “top races Democrat” didn’t get an equivalent suggestion.
Was this an intentional attempt to influence people’s thoughts? Probably not. A lot of people claim Google’s searches are based on an algorithm, meaning that every step of the process is explicitly laid out. I really doubt that there’s a design document that says to suggest “racist” when people search for “Republican.” Google’s results often don’t even have all the terms I search for! It looks a lot more like a huge amount of winging it than like an algorithm.
Any search engine will have unintentional biases built in. That’s why there should be a market for competing search servers and people should encourage exploring the alternatives. Telling people to Google doesn’t make you look smart; it makes you look like a conformist.
The “creepy line”
Google was recently caught working on the secret “Dragonfly” project for the Chinese government. It would have led to a search application for Chinese subjects that would have blocked material about protests and freedom and would give the authorities personal information on what people were viewing.
Google’s policy was once “Don’t be evil.” Really. Now it’s “Get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Eric Schmidt has said so.
The writer’s responsibility
As a writer, you affect people, whether you’ve got a huge audience or a tiny one. You need to take responsibility for your recommendations. If you persistently tell people to Google, you’re promoting a one-species ecosystem where the chance decisions of a few people have a huge impact on everyone. (That’s assuming they aren’t deliberately trying to influence people.) If you’re going to promote the biggest player, it should at least be paying you to do it. There’s no reason to give it your services for free.