Google Search: the utopian idea that is destroying the fabric of society

For the past month or so, I’ve been mulling a question about questions:

Is it possible that there are negative consequences to a system where anybody in the world, at any moment, can ask any question and expect some sort of answer with a high degree of privacy?

Back in June, I watched Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special, “Inside,” and then a couple days later I listened to “Search Party,” the first new Reply All episode in many months.

Both are products made by and for people whose brains have been overcooked by the internet. This essay is going to be another one of those things.

This is an essay about Google Search, and how it has fundamentally changed the way we relate to each other. Google has also changed our relationships with information and with curiosity in revolutionary ways.

At the outset, I want to say that this isn’t meant as a nostalgic look at the pre-internet world through rose-coloured glasses. Things today aren’t necessarily worse than they were before, but they’re different in a way that bears closer examination.

Social media: A utopian idea in an imperfect world

At one point during “Inside,” Burnham has a short interlude where he reflects on the relentless drive to post every thought and opinion at every moment. He asks the audience, “Can anyone shut the fuck up about anything?”

Burnham does a little actor/comedian trick of repeating the phrase, putting the emphasis on a different word each time, as though to dissect the sentence and examine each of its organs.

It’s a funny bit, albeit kind of derivative and hypocritical in a self-aware sort of way, because Burnham is a creature of the internet, a prolific poster, and of course he’s voicing this thought in his own Netflix special. Bo Burnham would like people to shut the fuck up once in a while, and he’s posting about it.

This idea is a well-worn trope: That there might be some downsides to social media, which gives everyone an opportunity to share with anybody on the globe. Maybe there are certain people (idiots, fascists, grifters, conspiracy theorists, Donald Trump) who can say bad things, and if their bad ideas are freely available online, bad things happen.

Originally, of course, we had the techno-utopians who believed that things would be better if everyone was given a voice. Social media gave rise to the Arab Spring, and Facebook Live gave us that lady in a Chewbacca mask. If we all had a voice, the utopian vision goes, we’d live in a more egalitarian, participatory world freed from the shackles of paternalistic gatekeeping.

It didn’t turn out that way. The paternalistic gatekeeping of newspaper editors gave way to news website comment sections, which were such a toxic cesspool that “Don’t read the comments” is now a standard journalistic bromide. And Facebook Live was fun until it was used by mass shooters to broadcast their orgy of violence and recruit new adherents to vile ideologies.

Personally I think, on balance, giving everyone a voice has been a good thing. It’s not an unambiguous good, but the benefits outweigh the downsides. It’s probably not possible to quantify the number of musicians who’ve found a following on Soundcloud, but never would’ve made it in the traditional corporate music system. There are many YouTubers that would never have gotten a tv show, but they’ve found a career creating media for a sliver of the global internet audience who vibes on their wavelength.

The ability to post on TikTok, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram has made it harder for elites to simply shut down uncomfortable conversations, in the way they could when information mostly moved by way of radio, TV, magazines and newspapers. The police could co-opt the traditional media much more effectively than they can control individuals livestreaming video of a violent arrest on a smartphone.

Being able to post is good, but it’s not good in an uncomplicated, utopian way. We can recognize, diagnose and attempt to mitigate the bad stuff without throwing the whole thing away. And by the way, the fact that very few people want to shut down social media entirely and write it off as a failed experiment is proof that people mostly think it’s good.

But what about Google?

In the past couple decades, Google has come to mean a lot of different things. It is a US$1.8 trillion company that controls the largest public repository of video online, the most popular mobile operating system in the world, by far the most dominant web browser, one of the most important email services in the world, and some other stuff too. A range of Google services also amount to the most powerful advertising platform ever devised by humans, which probably means that no entity has manipulated human behaviour at such a vast and pervasive scale as Google has.

Google (or, Alphabet, if you want to be pedantic) comes under plenty of criticism for lots of the things that it does as a business, and for other things that it neglects to do. But I don’t see a lot of critical examination of the foundational idea that Google is built on: the search engine.

I think part of the reason why Google Search doesn’t come under more scrutiny is because it’s so tightly tied to the World Wide Web. Google Search is largely useless without the open web, and the open web would be far less useful without a good search engine. People have lots to say about the web, but rarely disaggregate Google Search. Mostly, it’s just treated as a necessary and useful utility.

But Google is a major player in building and maintaining the web, and their search engine shapes the internet in foundational ways. Moreover, Google shapes how humans interface with the internet, and that matters quite a lot.

The basic idea of Google Search, according to the company, is this: “In a fraction of a second, Google’s Search algorithms sort through hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to find the most relevant, useful results for what you’re looking for.”

Essentially, Google aspires catalogue corpus of all digitized human knowledge, and allow everyone to ask questions and search for information for free. In reality it’s more complicated, and there are lots of caveats, but I think that’s the clean, idealistic notion.

If the fundamental idealistic notion at the core of social media is that everyone can post anything they want online, and it will be available to the global audience of internet users, then the fundamental idealistic notion of Google is that all of the world’s knowledge will be indexed, and anybody, at any time, can query the index instantly, conveniently and privately.

In reality, the Search bar is astonishingly opaque.

We intuitively type words and questions, and we receive results, but nobody outside the company really knows how the Search algorithm works. There are hints about how the Search bar functions, which “Search Engine Optimization” experts attempt to use to game the results, artificially bumping things towards the top of the page. We also know that Search results are tailored to each of us based on … well, we don’t exactly know what data, do we? But we know Google knows a lot about us.

We just take it on faith that Google Search delivers relevant results, because it seems to deliver relevant results, and Google tells us the results are relevant. In actual fact, of course, Google has profit-motivated interests that are real, and far more quantifiable than some vague notion of relevance. The Search results are good enough that we keep using Search, and the ads and ancillary Google services that populate the results page are taken for granted.

The anonymity of Google is fascinating. It is, simultaneously, deeply private and intensely scrutinized. We all know The Algorithm is watching our every Search, every click, coldly appraising us. We are being watched when we Search, but we are only being watched by the machine, and we are only being judged insofar as our searches and our desires might be used to more painstakingly target ads at us.

But do we ever expect our searches to be judged by other people? Would you print out a month of your search results and give them to me, to read?

That’s what happened on “Search Party,” a recent episode of Reply All where host Alex Goldman and BuzzFeed journalist Katie Notopolous exchanged several weeks’ worth of Google and YouTube searches and shared some awkward laughs. The basic premise of the bit was that your search queries are deeply private and intimate; as close as anything to a record of the inner workings of your mind.

What made the Reply All episode feel gently transgressive is that we would never ask Google the things we do, in the way we do, if we thought our searches would be read by another human. We are only comfortable being so vulnerable, because we are alone when we interact with the search bar. It’s just you and the machine.

You and the machine

For the past couple months, I’ve been thinking about how profoundly my mind is affected by my relationship with Google.

How did people learn things before Google? I don’t have much first-hand experience. I’m old enough to just dimly remember hearing about Google for the first time, around when I was in junior high. Before that we had Yahoo! and Alta Vista, AskJeeves and Mamma.com which searched all the other search engines, and billed itself as “The mother of all search engines.”

But if we rewind a little bit farther, before the internet, where did people go to get their questions answered? I suppose it depends on the nature of the question. For a lot of questions, people would ask friends, family and co-workers.

What’s the best way to drive from Toronto to Montreal? Are the insects under my deck termites? How do I get a mortgage? How much TV should I let my kids watch? How do I roast a turkey for Thanksgiving?

Information would be passed down from generation to generation, new information would trickle out from institutions — academic researchers, governments, corporations — and information would be transmitted to the population through newspapers and television programs, radio broadcasts and the Butterball hotline. Knowledge about specific topics was stored in books.

When I think about the ways that people learned information and got answers to their questions before the internet, I see the social fabric. Pulling aside a co-worker and asking them about something during a lunch break. Chatting with the guy who works at the hardware store. Phoning your cousin who’s an accountant. Watching the evening news, and talking about events with your neighbour.

And by the way, lots of times people just didn’t get an answer. And they were mostly cool with that. Google has changed that; the company’s search engine has trained us to feel like every question deserves to be asked and answered.

And how do we get answers to our questions? We ask the machine.

Institutions, and the eroding landscape of trust

It’s not just the people around us who used to answer our questions. There were also institutions that used to be repositories of trustworthy information.

If you wanted to research a topic, you might go to the library. You didn’t necessarily believe that every word in every book was the truth, but you trusted that the library only put reputable publishers on the shelves, and reputable publishers had an incentive to maintain a certain standard of quality.

For a different sort of trustworthy information on a specific topic, you might seek out a professor at the city university. You would go to a doctor for another sort of information, as a representative of the medical establishment. Grappling with a question of morality, you might seek out a member of the clergy at your house of worship.

I don’t mean to paint a simplistic picture that social institutions are good, and the internet is bad. Quite the contrary. I am an avowed atheist, and while I wouldn’t give all the credit to Google or the internet, I personally believe that eroding the church’s power as a social institution has improved countless lives. I also think that doctors are not infallible, and people Googling their symptoms has saved innumerable lives.

The point I’m getting at is simply that before the internet, there were social institutions with clear spheres of interest and expertise, and (rightly or wrongly) they were generally trusted by people. These institutions have not simply disappeared in the internet age, but for the most part, they have gone online.

Now when people are looking for answers, there are more trustworthy websites, and less trustworthy websites, but it can be difficult to tell which is which. They’re all just blue links on the Google Search results.

We know the answers we get are not completely trustworthy, but we are sold the idea that they are answers anyway. And to be very clear, we absolutely are being sold that idea. This is the heart of Google’s business model. You’ve got questions, and the Search engine will act as the middle-man, and at the other end there will be answers.

This isn’t necessarily worse than the way things were before, but it is different. And Google is right at the heart of it.

We now live in a world where we all share this idea that there is a single corpus of all human knowledge, and we can all query it, for free, with total privacy. And the entity at the nexus of this foundational reorganization of society is a single corporation that uses its position to sell ads targeted at you, specifically.

Oh, and by the way, in a three-month period in 2021, Google earned US$18.5 billion in profit on US$61.8 billion in revenue. That’s a 30 per cent profit margin. This is a wildly lucrative business.

So, just to thoroughly underscore this point: We have gone from a society where we primarily got answers by asking people we knew in our community, and by seeking guidance from trusted institutions with expertise, and we now live in a world where we all share this belief that essentially all of human knowledge is digitized online, and any answer can be found by making queries through a single company’s search engine, a wildly profitable service which it has a monopoly on.

I don’t mean to paint the past with rose coloured glasses. Like social media, I think the internet is more good than bad. I like the internet a lot. I live most of my life on the internet. And none of it would be possible without Google Search.

But this is a radical change, and I think we need to think critically about it, and examine the social consequences of Google. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here are just two issues that I think bear further discussion:

Google gives the false impression that there is an answer to every question

A fun game to play sometimes is to ask Google “Is [food item] healthy?” and then do another search for “Is [food item] unhealthy?” and see how different the results are.

Of course, if you step back and think about it, human anatomy, diet and nutrition are more complicated than a simple healthy/unhealthy binary. But in the moment, you just want a yes or no answer, and maybe a bit of validation for something you already believe to be true.

The same goes for searches like “Best microwave 2021” and similar.

The world is more complicated than the certainty of a simple, actionable answer, but I don’t want nuance and context, and if you try to give it to me, I’ll just click away to a different site that makes it easier to skim to the response I’m looking for.

What if there are certain questions that you shouldn’t be able to ask with complete privacy?

How much money would you need to be paid to post your full Google Search history (going all the way back to your very first search) online, and also email it to every contact on your phone?

We’ve all asked questions that would make us squirm. I’m not judging anybody for specific searches, but I do think there are a lot of questions you’d ask to Google that you wouldn’t ask to another human being, and that simple fact means you’re implicitly ashamed of it.

Everyone has shame. That’s fine. What matters is that Google has trained us to ask the questions we know we’re ashamed of. And inevitably, what comes next is asking questions free from shame.

If the question “Are some races smarter than others?” pops into somebody’s head, should they be able to ask that question with total privacy? What about “How to dispose of a body” or something like that?

Before you check for yourself, the first page of search results on the “dispose of a body” question reeks of careful curation. The engineers and product developers at Google are smart enough to anticipate this issue. But the actual results are beside the point.

The point is that we have all been trained by Google to expect answers to every question that pops into our heads, and when Google fails, most of us are clever enough to find other avenues. Most Google searches diligently avoid sharing links that tell you how to illegally pirate or stream TV shows and movies. People figure it out anyway.

The point is that our brains are now wired to search, and by and large, we’re wired to expect zero judgement or scrutiny from other people about what we choose to search the internet for.

Now, this is by no means a clear-cut issue. There are benefits to the anonymity of the Google Search bar. For example, I think a lot of people who struggle to come to terms with their sexual orientation find refuge in the anonymity of private internet searches.

People with weird niche interests who cannot find anybody to share their enthusiasm in the physical world, can search online and find the blogs and YouTube videos of their fellow travellers.

One of the best things about the internet is that it allows us to ask various versions of the question “Am I the only one like this?” and find community with other people who are like you — and that question is so vulnerable that it’s hard to imagine it without anonymity.

Some final thoughts

There’s no neat conclusion to this essay. I’ve spent the past couple months pondering how absolutely integral Google is to the basic cognitive processes inside my brain.

And frankly, for all the scrutiny and discussion we hear about Google as a company, I hear precious little criticism or examination of the Google Search engine as a massively influential, central institution in society.

I keep thinking about the idea of a social fabric, and all of us connected and sharing information and opinions. And instead of a social network as the main way to get answers to questions, now it’s just you and everything and everyone on the internet. And the conduit in between is the Google Search.

It’s overwhelming, and I think the change is more significant than I can fully comprehend.

We should think about this much more, talk about it, and examine the issue from all angles. That’s part of why I was so appreciative of Bo Burnham’s comedy special, because I feel like he’s taking a stab at this, in his own way.

For lack of a better way to wrap this up, here’s a funny song.

Postscript: I am sure that I am not the first person to have these thoughts. I suspect that there is academic writing on this topic.

For reasons that are entirely my own, but may be obvious to you if you read this far, I made the conscious choice not to Google this topic and read what other people may have written before writing my own ideas.