Google Search – the Hidden Story – Andra Keay - ARIN 6912

Google (ˈɡuːɡ ə l) means search: — n

1. a popular search engine on the internet — vb

2. to search for (something on the internet) using a search engine3. to check (the credentials of someone) by searching for websites containing his or her name

from the Collins English Dictionary

Search has always been Google’s mission:“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

“The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people – or smarter. For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” Larry Page 2002

Google research project began at Stanford in 1996as PhD project “BackRub” which was published as the “PageRank” algorithm

Incorporated/Domain purchased in 1997 Launched privately, funded by Sun in 1998

Developed click through optimized advertizing revenue model 1999-2000Provided services to Yahoo 2000-2002

Went public in 2004

Google’s first front page - from Google’s interactive timeline

“My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” From Is Google Making Us Stupid? - The Atlantic, July-August 2008

"If you’ll walk around with a Bluetooth headset hanging from your ear, you’ll probably walk around with a Google chip in your brain.” From Computing the Cost - The Sun, March, 2009

“Each epoch is a co-production between its forms of memory practices and the engaged activities of the people concerned, producing a particular time and space in which humans and their information technologies are synchcronised.”from Turnbull on Bowker & Starr

Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject as a relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms. wikipedia on performativity

We are just pattern matching monkeys!

Vietnam Veterans Memorial in memory of 58,261 soldiers

“Google contends that its search engine relies on humans and machines. Matt Cutts, a software engineer who heads Google's Webspam team, said users who place links on their own Web pages pointing to other sites provide the raw information about valued sites that is incorporated into Google's PageRank algorithm. How best to utilize that information requires continuing work by human engineers. ''Algorithms don't leap out of Google like Athena from the head of Zeus,’’ From The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip – NY Times 2007

"ONCE upon a time, the most valuable secret formula in American business was Coca-Cola's. Today, it's Google's master algorithm.” From The Human Touch That May Loosen Google’s Grip – NY Times 2007

“When you are in the business of organising the world’s information, what is learned in one domain often finds practical application in another.” Randall Stross

“We don’t have better algorithms,” said Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig. “We just have more data.”

Google’s Early Page Rank Algorithm

In 2006, AOL was heavily criticised for breach of privacy when they released some ‘anonymous’ search strings for research purposes.

The data is still available on some websites. More recently, Google’s wifi data collection has also caused breach of privacy complaints.

We’d like to think that there’s a direct path from us, via Google, to all the information on the internet. Just like this 2004 attempt to map links between European universities. The reality is different. There’s too much information and an estimated 1/3 of the internet is not accessible.

Google doesn’t have all the answers.

But it does have a different answer for everyone.

Not everyone agrees with Google.

Personalized search with ads PLUS all thebooks, maps, docs, labs, images, movies, goggles, power, earthengine, streetview, android,chat, mail, speech recognition, voice, translate, google squared… what next?

Google would like your genetic data too.

Bibliography

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