5.5 Does Google shape what we know?

Are search engines, then, and Google in particular, gatekeepers? ‘Gatekeeping’ as a term comes from a tradition in the study of media and political communication concerned with who decides what news is being watched, read or listened to. It has recently begun to be applied to the internet/Web (Barzilai-Nahon 2008). Yet there is a key difference between search engines and other media in respect to gatekeeping: on the one hand, the whole of the large technological infrastructure of the Web is available to users (again, putting aside for the moment issues of who lacks access, and China plus some other countries with censorship), in contrast with other media or infrastructures that are often national or have a limited reach. At the same time, gatekeeping in relation to search engines does not pertain to content: Google provides no content itself (or only a tiny amount), but it provides access (again, with exceptions such as censorship) to the whole of the Web’s content.¹² Thus, instead of gatekeeping, it is more appropriate to speak, in the case of the search engine component of this infrastructure, of a monopoly of attention – in this sense shaping everyday life. Google has a dominant ‘audience share’ of attention, in comparison to all other gatekeepers; put differently, it determines online visibility or prominence.

In this (non-economic) sense, Google is monopolistic in shaping what we know. Caveats will be introduced shortly, but this is one part of how technology has come to shape everyday life. However, it is only half the story because it can immediately be added that Google is only the neutral algorithm that is shaped by what we, the users, want to find – again, unlike in the case of other media gatekeepers. As Granka puts it, ‘aggregate analyses of Web traffic and Web behavior’ as done by search engines ‘only reveal the tastes of mass publics...we are not expecting search engines to change innate public opinion’ (2010, 370). Or, more pithily, ‘aggregate traffic merely reflects mass tastes’ (2010, 371). Google and other search engines do not shape our attention, they only channel it. Put differently, whereas other media and information sources provide the content of our attention, Google focuses it.

Yet there is one modification we must make to Granka’s statement: yes, insofar as users’ attention is shifting to content on the Web, is being used routinely and as the main way to access information. We know the Web – or at least get to it – through Google. Hence this could be described as an autocracy – one ruler – though the ruler here is an automaton, a machine (or an algorithm), and a democracy – we, the people, or the users, determine its outcomes: an auto-demo-cracy.¹³ This way of thinking about how search engines shape what we know can be contrasted with Introna and Nissenbaum’s (2000) influential argument that search engines are biased and thus the politics of search engines matters. At the core of Introna and Nissenbaum’s argument are two ideas: the first is that there is no transparency about Google’s or other search engine algorithms. This is true, so one caveat is that neither I nor anyone apart from Google’s engineers know just how autocratically-democratically its search engine works: for all I know, when I type in a query, there is a person at the other end – perhaps Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google – who sends or serves me an individualized results page that he thinks suits me or that he wants to direct at me. This is highly unlikely, but it cannot be ruled out and points to the inscrutability of search engine algorithms. Brin and Page (1998) based their original idea for a search engine on the notion of hyperlinks as citations; that is, the more links (citations) a page gets, the more others must want to read it, or PageRank. This is still the underlying (algorithmic) basis of search, and this mechanism is neutral (it is an algorithm) as well as relying on having a large enough number of users – even if not a monopoly – to do this well. As Granka notes (2010, 367), the algorithm has become more complex than a single ‘citation count’ algorithm: in fact, to assess the ‘authoritativeness’ of a website, Google uses many rules, also to avoid spamming. Yet the underlying idea of PageRank still governs search. The problem, again, is that there is no way of knowing how this mechanism really works; it is a ‘black box’.

Introna and Nissenbaum’s second key argument is that search should not be left to market mechanisms since the Web is a public space or a ‘public good’. They say that market competition between search engines will not necessarily reflect or provide the access needed – for example, to less visible sites that are overlooked by search engines – to sustain an open and diverse public space. In this sense, Google is biased against being a ‘public good’. But again, it is hard to see what search engines are biasing us towards, except our own preferences, plus Google’s ‘contentless’ aim of maximizing its audience or market share. As has just been argued, search engines are also a case of extreme democracy, the opposite of political bias, since each search or click counts as one ‘vote’ as to what others should read, see or hear on the Web (Google even suggests what we should ‘vote’ for, with its autocomplete function, which predicts and finishes our incomplete search terms). This may be a completely non-transparent regime, an autocracy, but it depends entirely on ‘support’ from its mass-democratic audience. If Google stopped having sufficient users, it would decline, since its results would become ever poorer as it could no longer update results in light of the changing content of the Web. Google’s ‘monopoly’ thus relies on its users, except that, again, no one, with the possible exception of engineers within Google or other large search engine companies, knows what market or attention share, or what number of continuous users (what democratic constituency), is needed to keep a search engine working in an adequate way or in a way that is superior to its rivals.

Another caveat to the shaping power of search engines is needed: it could be argued that people have many ways to access Web pages without search engines, such as via bookmarks, links they are sent and the like. However, as we have seen, this is not how most people ‘find’ information most of the time: they use search engines as an easy means of accessing Web pages they already know, that is, the ‘navigational’ uses (in Waller’s study, again, this constituted almost half of all uses: 2011a, 774). While alternatives exist, in practice, these common uses of search in accessing the Web dominate and thus shape everyday life in a pervasive way. In other words, there is a link between how these widespread uses reinforce the power of the technology – and vice versa. Or, to put it the other way round, it would nowadays be difficult to see how the Web could be accessed without search engines much of the time, which is how this large technological system and its key algorithmic component have become deeply embedded in everyday life.

It is true, of course, that Google has become a large commercial behemoth, which needs to generate large-scale revenues to sustain itself.¹⁴ Yet this revenue-seeking does not bias the ‘organic’ (non-advertising) results as opposed to the ‘sponsored’ (advertising) results.¹⁵ Hence, for advertising, there is a ‘bias’ towards a market mechanism, with those who have paid the highest price being placed at the top. Aside from this, search results are based on an algorithm and the ways in which it has been refined over the years. It can be noted that this is also why this large technological system has so far not encountered much entanglement with other social forces: roads and cars require a lot of regulation because they affect many other parts of society; search engine results are not affected by such entanglements. However, the exceptions – such as censorship of results and the like – are telling, and these exceptions have curtailed or shaped Google’s dominant position.

The absence of an extensive hardware infrastructure can be seen in that the system of power plants and fibre-optic cables, for example, though complex and requiring considerable resources, is largely separated from users and results. Unlike other infrastructures, whose infrastructures are much more extensive, visible and physically demanding – if we think of road transport, for example – search engine infrastructures are largely ‘invisible’. (Road infrastructures are too, but they have become so over the course of a century, and still often become visible, as when they break down.) Again, all that users see of this infrastructure, and use, is a simple rectangular box on their screen into which they put their query, plus the search engine results pages. The remainder of the ‘system’, the internet/Web, provides the bulk of the infrastructure, also not very visible to most users. The power of the technology rests to a large extent on its use by millions of users every day, and they are therefore as much a part of Google’s dominance as the algorithm itself: I cannot think of any other large technological system where the users and uses of the technology reinforce its dominant position to a similar extent.

Note that I am not concerned here with term ‘monopoly’ in the economic sense (see Pollock 2010) or the market side of search engines, and thus with sponsored results (advertising). In fact, from the consumer side, the product is free, whereas monopolistic market behaviour can typically extract high costs. Monopoly could be used here to designate the dominant effect of technology uses in people’s or consumers’ everyday lives: in this sense, globally, and in the countries examined here (always excluding China), Google has a dominant share of searches performed – where dominant means, say, more than two-thirds. (In fact, Pollock points out, in economic regulation against monopolistic behaviour the cut-off that is often used is 50 per cent.) This figure of more than two-thirds market share applies globally (91.66 per cent),¹⁶ and it applies in the United States (85.88 per cent), Australia (94.2 per cent) and the UK (88.99 per cent), the main countries discussed earlier, as well as Sweden (93.69 per cent) and India (96.65 per cent).¹⁷ The exceptions are China, where Baidu (more than 90 per cent) dominates search engine use, and Russia, where Yandex dominates, and a few others: note, however, that these shares do not go against Google’s globally dominant position in terms of attention.¹⁸

It is also worth noting that consumers or audiences are not the only search engine ‘users’; equally there are all those who want to become visible, even if they are not advertisers: for example, academics. If we subtract advertisers (and thus sponsored results), these others include all those who would like to have an audience for the information they provide, such as bloggers, non-commercial news media, non-governmental organizations and many more. Ideally, the demand of consumers for information should be met by the supply of these information providers. However, in this competition for attention, these information providers, like search engine users, do not have much of a choice: how visible they are, or how much their web pages are accessed, depends to a large extent on search engines, especially the dominant one, and how attention is channelled by users.

The thrust of the argument can be appreciated by pitting it against two widespread ideas about Google. The first is the statement by Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google during antitrust hearings in the US Senate, that ‘it’s also possible not to use Google search...the competition is just one click away’.¹⁹ This statement is true in principle, but in practice, as we have seen, it is misleading, or at least sociologically naive: Google derives its power partly from the number of users, and partly from how its algorithm has been refined within a large technological infrastructure. More than that, it is not clear how fleeting Google’s monopoly is – in the way argued by Schumpeter that technological advantage is inevitably fleeting, to be undone by ‘creative destruction’: it is conceivable that Google will maintain its advantage for some time, just as other large technological systems have done and continue to do.

The second misleading idea is that Google maintains its power through its political or social position. To be sure, there are instances of such entanglements: caving in to Chinese government censorship before the decision to abandon mainland China, or in relation to techniques to prevent ‘gaming’ visibility rankings, or lobbying the US and European governments in relation to communications and data policy, and more. These are no doubt important and, for reasons mentioned earlier, will become more so. Yet the statement is misleading because the bulk of how the technology works is indeed neutral: the results that are displayed are the product of an impersonal mechanism calculating the most relevant results, a combination of autocracy and democracy on a dominant – monopolistic – scale.²⁰ If Google no longer provided the results that people were seeking, then its powerfulness would presumably decline, despite the strength of its political or economic position.

A brief contrast can be made with Facebook, which also has a monopoly of attention based on users flocking to this free – aside from advertising – service. Facebook’s overwhelmingly dominant position, however, is based on the well-known network effect whereby users are locked into their contact network – they are unable to switch to another network in which their contacts are not members, as with telephony in the early days, or with other social networks. Google’s monopoly, in contrast, is based on the first mover advantage whereby the vast majority have used and continue to use its service without being ‘locked-in’ (Arthur 1989) by other users as their contacts.

It is important not to exaggerate the significance of monopoly and auto-demo-cracy: again, Google does not, for the most part, control content. It is a gatekeeper in controlling visibility and does so largely in a neutral way. Its power lies in the fact that a large part of our everyday lives is dominated and thus shaped by using the technology of one company. Google’s slogan ‘don’t be evil’²¹ seems apt here, as the potential for harmful control is highly concentrated in this case in a unique way. Yet any such perceived and known harm would also harm the company: indeed, the increasing awareness by users that Google knows a lot about people’s habits, even where these do not pose a threat to individual users, is having adverse consequences for its reputation. Another famous Google slogan is equally apposite: ‘Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’²² Again, the ‘mission’ is about organizing, not producing content, though this statement, like ‘don’t be evil’, has the ring of an omniscient autocrat.

Again, this power should not be blown out of proportion: it is as if the electricity grid (another large technological system) was provided mainly by one company, though the electricity itself was provided by others. Indeed, this has been the case, and is still so, in a number of countries. Yet a dominant share of users use one grid. Or again, it is as if one company controlled the infrastructure of a medium such as the newspapers or television, with separate companies controlling the content, cases for which, again, there are examples. In both cases, as with Google, the dominant position inherent in Google’s own slogans would be problematic only if Google used its position to deliberately extract advantage from a social science (not including economics) perspective, as here. Whether market dominance harms competition from the point of view of economics is a different matter (which I am not competent to discuss and not interested in here): the gatekeeping monopoly I am documenting is one of form, not content. Some scholars have hypostatized the effects of search engines and Google in particular, as their very titles suggest: The Googlization of Everything (Vaidhyanathan 2011) and Search Engine Society (Halavais 2008). But not everything is being googled, and nor do we live in a society pervaded by search: the uses of search engines must be put in their – limited, but significant – social contexts.