Before the Internet, if I were a responsible shopper, I imagine I might have gone to a mall – but you know, a couple of weeks early. These days, as a responsible shopper, I have to order off the Internet even more than a couple of weeks early, which trust me, isn’t any more likely to happen. Besides, some things you can’t buy off of the Internet, like a musical instrument. All I knew was I wanted a musical instrument my two year old niece could smack gleefully without bothering the parents too much.

First, I searched my brain – good old trusty brain. It told me that quite obviously what I was looking for was a glockenspiel, stupid. Good old smart-ass brain. So I’m off, romping around aimlessly in a confused state looking for any kind of store that seems like it might sell a glockenspiel. I can’t even spell glockenspiel. I’m screwed. But it’s my fault I’m screwed, really, because my chosen phone isn’t smart enough. Phone IQ medians change, apparently.

I’ve used a basic blackberry for a few years now, no-frills web and essential e-mail. I’ve been able to broadcast location info, manually, and receive basic information and messages when out and about, a revolution in and of itself – I’m no location information virgin – but I can’t kid myself, for the most part it’s just text messaging on steroids. I’ve never had that gratifying lazy sit-back-and-be-pampered with location-savvy data stuff being fed to me effortlessly, by virtue of my latitude and longitude. What’s the opposite of broadcasting? Broadceiving? Yeah, never had it.

But next year. Lookout Daisy. I expect the world. I’m gonna buy me a fancy-assed phone, click the ‘report my whereabouts to government agencies and Google’ button, and let the shopping stress just melt away. Right?

The potential for GPS enabled, location aware cell phones to change the way we search for merchandise, services, and, well, anything at all that you have to be near to want, is mind-bogglingly massive. Our friendly neighbourhood data comptrollers Google and pals have not failed to notice this fact, of course, and are quietly planning world domination via what might seem to be an innocently coincidental, convenient, or just geekily clever, convergence of acquired technologies.

Today Google went ahead and admitted/announced/gleefully-spewed it has built (no no it was HTC, really) a consumer cell phone, the Nexus One, and will be selling them itself. From Google freaking dot com slash freaking phone. For the first time Google is selling something directly to the consumer, and it’s giving me the willies.

The plan, quite openly, is to make a bunch of money per handset, presumably by partnering with merchants and providing advertising that has the mobility value-add of knowing exactly where the potential customer is in space-time (our personal-life-data-trail (ahem, profile) now includes how long you spend at the grocery store, in the chips aisle – lookout! Run to tinfoil aisle!).

In simple terms I expect merchants to hop on the standardize-our-inventory-and-submit-to-Google train, then have the opportunity to help make real the lazy-man’s last minute Christmas shopping experience that I so meta-selfishly desire (I guess that wasn’t simple terms, my bad).

Google, incidentally, recently became an affiliate – offering ads for a percentage of sales. Woopdee do, who cares, you think, if you don’t know what it means to be an affiliate. Oh crap, you think, if you do. And so the future’s plot thickens (rarely does it thin – Obama maybe). The same week they announce the phone Google enters talks to buy Yelp (*gulp*) .

I’m no conspiracy nut, but c’mon, Google would be stupid to not offer me 10% off jeans if I buy two pairs at Old Navy in the next hour because I happen to be ten feet from Old Navy and my Nexis One’s accelerometer just felt itself drop through the hole in my tattered pockets so obviously I need some pants and oh, wouldn’t you like 15% off of the Thai place around the corner, it’s only three hundred yards to your right. I know you like Pad-Thai, Naoise. You’ve tried a few home recipes. You usually eat lunch around 12:30, don’t you Naoise? AHH my phone’s talking to me! And not in the normal, phone call way. In a bad, Hal way.

Google won’t be stupid and own everything, or even make things exclusive, risking anti-trusting finger pointing (could Google make ‘open source’ the biggest scapegoat concept ever?), but on the Google phone Google apps will run so crisply, and be so … what’s the word? Ohyeah, free, that everyone will use them. Competitors will innovate, and build up a following, to inevitably be out-innovated (ooh cool word), or bought, by Google. It’s a pretty sweet self-satisfying cycle, and it only makes sense to own the handset – I think Google sees all the potential Apple is squandering in its handset ownership duties.

Of course Google says this is all about choice in the marketplace for evolving superphone devices blah blah, thin veil blah. The most obvious tell that this is about owning the users more than the sale, is that you have to have a Google checkout account to buy a phone. Kapow, Google has a direct path to sell anything to you in the future. Anything. From anybody. Anywhere. Incognito (it’s not itunes, it’s just a checkout at the end!).

So what has to happen for my imagined lazy shopping experience to truly materialize? Well there is a tug-o-war of reasoning that has to be worked through – local merchants won’t adopt until there is an active pool of people to advertise to. But Google knows that when an ad network starts it needs to attract merchants with wee samples of high converting audiences, letting merchants imagine there is an infinite pool of potential golden traffic to be tapped – get the merchants in early and it’s easy to keep them.

Google’s handset sells for $529, cheaper if you buy it with a plan from a provider. A lot of people expected Google to do something radical and make the phone really cheap – the public understands enough to know Google sells ads and will make money off of each handset sold. Instead of going cheap Google made their phone the same price as other exclusive phones – whether intentional or not, this ensures Google’s audience for the emerging mobile consumer market in the US doesn’t thin in buying-power too soon, which will have the effect of impressing early advertisers.

Earlier in ’09 I wrote a post about ways the Internet might change that could alter how we think about and interact with the concept of search. The first item on the list was a look at personalized information agents – information fetching algorithms that learn about your habits and present information proactively you might want to see. Google, with its recent adaptation of personalized search as the default for Google search, is lumbering slowly down an inevitable road towards being my personal information agent.

Google knows that the story my cell phone has to tell, the one item which I never move more than a few hundred feet without taking with me, is so information rich, so personal, that they could convert it into staggeringly useful stuff-of-search.

They’ve already proven that if you simply blend staggeringly useful stuff with a mix of innocuous, somewhat relevant advertising, people go ‘meh, could be worse’, and you get away with all the advertising.

Next year, with my fancy-assed new phone, which by then will have a ‘find-my-presents’ app that knows I’m shopping for my three year old niece, I’ll be saved the trouble of actually searching right? As I happen to be walking down a random street in December, my phone will suggest that I turn left here, go to the music shop across the street, and try out the four star recommended glockenspiel, because obviously that’s what I’m looking for, stupid. Local merchant makes a sale, Google gets a cut, and I experience a world where the searching part of finding things becomes obsolete.

So in the end it’s inevitable that I’ll get my lazy-man’s shopping experience – just what I oh-so-uncarefully wished for – and yet, I can’t shake the willies. What is the smart-ass part of my brain hinting at?

As ugly as it may be to some traditionalists, the three column layout is a more intuitive ‘web site’ shape, and is going to be intuitive to use for a wide variety of users. This push comes from Marissa Mayer at Google, the VP of Search Product and User Experience, as it is outlined by Danny over at Search Engine Land.

The party line is that Google wants to test and see if this user experience is well received by the populace at large. If it speeds up the way people complete their search, for instance, it should be weighed as a positive. This potential UI shift is a major departure for Google, and intuitively search marketers and all of their mothers quickly identify this three column Google with the recently revamped competitor, Bing.

It’s natural for Google to take the competition seriously, and the fact that Microsoft deployed with a left-side navigation means it was tested, and worked. It also was giving MS fodder to differentiate themselves from Google – it helped back up their ‘decision engine’ branding (which I still don’t agree with so much, but if Google makes this change, I may have to eat my words).

This left-side navigation, three column layout is also a lot more like a traditional website, and so it is intuitive for everyone – it settles the brain a little, that navigational anchor. Google has thrown so much odd looking junk into their results recently that I think it must be alienating some of the searching population.

Those less savvy or comfortable online are going to see universal results and may not know how to react – thinking, ummmm, is this weird stuff more important? Should I be clicking on this? Which could, if not turn them off completely, slow them down by milliseconds – how to speed that back up? Bring the comfort back. Put a left hand column, make it feel like a traditional website so that weird stuff on that part of the screen no longer appears weird, and people get click-happy again.

But Google is just testing, albeit with more public relations than they have tested with in the past. Usually the Google search engine results page (SERP) evolves in silence, with little fanfare, after some sample testing has gone on in the background.

Google is constantly tinkering, but it seems like sweeping changes have begun to stick a lot more frequently in the past 18 months. Aaron Wall recently wrote to the fact that Google’s brand ownership of the above the fold real estate of their own SERPs can, with certain queries, be ridiculously favoured to something Google owned or related:

Source: SEO Book

When I was a PubCon Vegas the other week I had a chat with the search consultant working with Sony BMG on fixing up half-disastrous major artist sites like MichaelJackson.com – and the conversation settled down to the above the fold issue. For a query like ‘Michael Jackson Movie’ he is used to explaining how organic has to compete with a whole heck of a lot of Adwords, but now he has to explain dealing with a gaggle of Google goodies: Google Movies, Google Music, Google News, Mostly Google owned Video results and potentially now, Google Shopping/Product results.

It’s clear Google has acquired an appetite for traffic cannibalization of some design. Is it simply an act of brand-building, keeping surfers within their network, or is it a reactionary measure to counter the paranoia induced by virtual-private-internetz like the nemesistic foe Facebook, and those pushing a competing ‘search product’ that is more fully featured? Or is it something broader reaching, something Google feels it needs to do while it has the market share it has now?

I’m not being conspiratorial here, just contemplative. Google is in a unique position to do user testing on a mass scale rarely seen before, and in an intelligent enough way to draw meaningful results. If Google decides that it should look and act like our opening screenshot implies, you can bet it’s not a whim – but the question is, are they judging their results by positive user impact, or by some internal metric that incorporates things like profitability, or, now that they seem to be running a network of sites, network retention of the surfer?

If this is the case positive user impact might be replaced with minimizing negative user impact while increasing profit or retention. This would be much more likely, in Google’s long term planning, to be evaluated as something resembling ‘user acceptance and adaptation potential’. Google is big. Really, really big. They’re also close to a monopoly in North American search. Although big, North America is a relatively isolated culture – it creates its own trends. Google then, has the opportunity to not only serve a culture’s need for search, but also, at least in part, to define the expectations people have of what they think search results are, or should be.

This is a position of unimaginable power, though most people wouldn’t have cause to notice, or in most cases, so long as things don’t change too much, care. People outside of the industries of search marketing, librarianship, ontology and psychology, rarely compartmentalize the concept of ‘search’ as being something people do with intent, develop as a skill, or have defined expectations about while performing.

People do, of course, search with intent, some more skillfully than others, and absolutely everyone who has ever used Yahoo! or the like, has expectations as to what will be returned from that tabula rasa come search box. In the search industry there is an old turn of phrase that has evolved its meaning in context as the search results pages have changed: Ten Blue Links. The classic, plain-Jane search results page of ten blue links on a white page form the basic schema upon which western culture has built their expectations of internet based ‘search results’. I’m not defending it as ideal, just pointing out that it is in fact a schema.

It has only been a couple of short years since the most basic experimentation with the classic motif started taking place. Google eventually lost its timidity and started pushing search results changes without any explicit user input (you could always command Google to do things like serve you scraped dictionary results with a ‘define:’ query).

Universal search was the public face put to the conceptual change Google had begun instigating. By using it as a publicity vehicle, Google made it more than acceptable for people to expect images and videos in their search results – with a little testing the big G scaled back the concept of actually playing back videos from their search results pages, choosing instead to push people to the video site such as Youtube. The Youtube acquisition also gave Google a chance to peer into their audience a little more, interact with them, learn about them, and it also gave them another taste of the pure fabled Facebook honey.

Remember, this is a Facebook who openly states that they intend to change the way people think of search, by being the first to tie everything to a personal social graph, and bring information and recommendation origins back around, once again closer to home. They also state openly that they plan to beat Google at their own game.

Google on the other hand has been busily blossoming our concepts of what search should be by injecting more and different types of content into its search results, and slowly inching closer to people’s personal and social lives. But Google has to decide if they even want to accommodate the mental shift in ‘what search means’ that Facebook wishes to see take place. If anything they aught to be pushing the concept of openness in search, the extended value of crowd-sourced recommendations. There is more information in the wild, and a lot of people don’t have a social graph capable of recommending a new television, or the perfect learning toy for their one year old – but Google does.

The simple truth is, however Google decides to alter its results page will *define* how American culture, and perhaps beyond, perceive what a search result should *be*. Recently, Google has been pushing the envelope of what a search result means. In fact, sitting right inside the results pages these day’s are Google’s own personal affiliate links. Google ‘Product Listing Ads’ is Google.com acting like an affiliate site, where they allow you to list your product inventory links much like traditional Adwords ads, but you pay per acquisition instead of per click.

The ‘Product Results’ which appear to sit in the right sidebar look a whole heck of a lot like the ‘Shopping results’, in the new way they are constructed and displayed. The interesting bit is that the shopping results appear to be integrated right into the middle of search results pages, an area we have traditionally been conditioned to think of as holding purely organic content. And from where I’m sitting, they’re not clearly labeled as ads if they’re labeled as ‘Shopping results’ and ‘Product listings’.

As Google integrated Universal Search with pictures, videos and news, we thought of it as benignly ‘organic’, but now it seems it may simply have been softening us up mentally for the introduction of commercial elements into the middle of our classic Ten Blue Links schema – and with Shopping results, Google has taken direct advantage of the natural trust we have in that portion of their SERPs, by integrating images with a simple heading that almost, but not quite, differentiates them as advertising – many of us will take on trust that these are a natural addition to what we, as a culture, have naively been thinking of as purely organic real-estate.

Is it an inevitability that we will have to update our old concepts of search to include a continuous commercial slant? Probably. This is all somewhat expected, but one Google test pointed out by Aaron Wall sent more of a chill through my spine than the idea of Surgey Brin, Superaffiliate, and it was this little obfuscation of the URL, replaced with breadcrumbs:

Source: Seo Book

If Google is going to take the URL reference away from the SERPs, then they are thinking in broader terms. A lot of content publishers, old school and new, feel threatened by Google co-opting their content, and if Google decides to minimize the importance of the domain name as a reference point for content origin in the SERPs (the domain name is still the main way to brand a business online), then it places further space between what Google wants you to think of as ‘search results’, and the space in our minds they still own completely, our traditional Ten Blue Links.

It’s obvious Google is planning on evolving their results pages, and as they do they will have to match the SERPs to their strategy of how they want users to think of ‘search results’ over the next five years. They have real competition with innovation and deep pockets working at changing the public’s idea of what search means to match their own products, which they’re intentionally differentiating from Google Search. What Google decides to do with their results pages in 2010 may define their short-term future, and may change the way people think about search, fundamentally, over the next few years – but only if Microsoft or Facebook don’t see too much success themselves in the same effort.

Naoise’s Note: This is a guest post by Cathy Camper, a librarian for the Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR. Cathy’s work has appeared in places such as Wired, Cricket, Cicada, Primavera, Women’s Review of Books, Lambda Book Reports, Utne Reader and Giant Robot. Full bio at the end of the post, or visit www.cathycamper.com – Thanks for the amazing contribution to the Acquisio Blog Cathy! (p.s. – I take full responsibility if wordpress has prevented me from displaying your article in as nicely presented formatting as it was provided to me, my apologies, but I can’t access the css to indent your paragraphs).

Forward and Backward; Musings on Librarianship and the Future of Search

By Cathy Camper

This article is written in response to Naoise Osborne’s engaging post “Nine Ways the Internet Could Change that Would Make Search as We Know it Obsolete” (August 26, 2009). As I read it, I had an eerie feeling that for me, a librarian, the future he described is my now. I posted a response, and Naoise invited me to write about search from a librarian’s viewpoint. So here I am.

Disclaimers first: like Naoise, I’m not a futurist, and unlike some of my colleagues, my job is to help people find what they want, not to work on the technical side of search, search engine optimization or search innovation.

Still, as a public librarian, search, as well as its more obsessive cousin, organization, is at the core of what I do. The future of finding information is the future of my job. When I first discovered online marketing articles addressing search, I was thrilled. But my eyes soon glazed over reading discussions of stickiness, click-through and bounce rates. My goal as a librarian is simply to ensure patrons find what they want. It doesn’t matter if they stare at one page all day or flip through hundreds if they leave satisfied. Libraries aren’t selling anything. Like the U.S. Post Office, public libraries often are left to do what no commercial enterprise would take on, for example, provide free Internet service, and instruction, to everyone.

In some ways, Google trumped librarians good when it fulfilled the publics’ need for a magic box that would find whatever the public typed in. Author, title, keyword, call numbers – the public never understood or cared what library metadata was anyways, and it turned out even accuracy mattered less than getting a slew of answers to requests in the blink of an eye.

On a larger scale, the Internet rearranged librarians’ approach to knowledge overnight. The one right answer no longer sat for years in a volume on the reference shelf; now there were many right answers, which would also always be changeable. The right answer might exist anywhere, not just on shelves or in catalog order, or provided by people of a particular profession, class, training or status. Actually this has always been true about knowledge. But now the speed and breadth of electronic information meant it could no longer be ignored, or protected by knowledge gatekeepers.

Librarians today are kind of like early mammals in dinosaur days, scurrying between the claws of commercial search giants like Google and Amazon, grabbing crumbs of information either straight from the behemoth’s clutches, or plucking information the bigger reptiles miss, to feed the needs of those that ask. We supplement search using books, databases, library resources and other means to fill in what the dinosaurs can’t provide.

One of the main contentions I have with futurist scenarios about information and search (for example, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous) is that they are often built on an unstated platform of optimistic, forward movement, assuming a democratization of information access by making it free. Google replaces the lockdown of organizational systems with the infinite flex of individual search. Tagging does away with the Dewey Decimal system and the card catalog. Social networking disperses authority and expertise to everyone; Wikipedia cumulates it. MP3’s make CDs obsolete. Internet trumps library; the e-book trumps paper. Even the name and number of Web 2.0 implies a movement beyond, away from, whatever was the web point zero.

But the reality librarians deal with is that knowledge also moves backwards, authority and expertise still exist, and matter, and “free” may have costs.

Some examples. You’re restoring a 1930’s car. You need to see color samples to do a historically accurate restoration. Repair manuals, car books and extensive online searching turns up no color pictures. A library with magazine back issues may answer your needs; by searching backwards, you find a color ad for the car that shows not only the hues but also how they were applied.

Or say your research demands primary sources. Pretty much anything before 1982 may still be on paper, unless there’s been demand, (and funds) to digitize it. OK, so maybe it’s not on paper, it’s on a floppy disc. Or microform.

Which leads to another wrinkle. We have to not only search backward, we have to retain a method of doing it, technologically, if that information is to be of use. In the next twenty years, imagine the computers we inherit of baby boomers who’ve kicked the bucket. If and when the grandkids figure out the passwords, will they have any desire to look at Grandpa’s 10,000 unlabeled digital photos? If he’s uploaded and tagged some to Flickr, they might survive, but for the family archives, it might be the shoebox of labeled paper photos that gets passed on down the line. What about those unmarked floppy discs for a Commodore 64? Even if the family has the desire, can they find the machine to read them?

As to authority and expertise, it still exists right there in the double o’ed logo of Google’s branding. The hidden change is that it’s been corporatized. These search giants are commercial; their best right answer, in essence, is a product to buy. Google is free only in that it makes enough on advertising to stay solvent. Google works well if you want to buy something. It works less well if you’re researching expertise in knowledge, say in the forefront of cancer research, where a medical database or a cancer institution’s holdings may be more to the point.

Another problem with corporatized information is that it’s not always in the users interest, though it often looks to be. An example might be when your financial institution pushes you towards electronic banking by telling you “conserving paper conserves trees.” They’re also not telling you the cost of electronic banking, or that should you need a paper statement, the bank will now charge you for that. Similarly, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook strive to maintain an image of magnanimity, offering “free “products, while at the same time extracting payment from users via privacy invasion, and maintaining an ultimate authority over what gets shown and who gets space. These social networks aren’t public square forums where anyone can say their piece. Read through their user agreements to see who has ultimate say.

Speaking of users, patrons, customers, they also can direct search skills backwards as well as forwards. Public libraries have been hugely influenced this way by the recent recession. No longer can a ditch digger find a new job through newspaper want ads. Now, he has to look online, on Craig’s list. But to do so, a 50-year-old ditch digger has to learn to type. He has to know how to write a resume, and use software to do that. Then he has to learn to use the Internet, e-mail protocol, and letter writing skills. He has to have an e-mail address. And he has to have Internet access. If he can’t afford it, his only free access is one hour a day at the public library.

Libraries go backwards to bring these users forwards. True, it’s momentary, and in some rosy future, all people will be Internet savvy or will have died off. But what may not change is that the Internet will be freer for some than for others. One hour a day, shared access, will give you different results and opportunities than owning your own computer with 24-7 availability. The Internet may be the land of milk and honey, but the bottleneck to get there, for many, is long and narrow.

So this is the state of my job now, to move backwards and forwards, to find the best answer to match the individual needs of each patron. In a way, my job is to be a Web 2.0 search engine, to search what David Weinberger calls the “mess of information” out there, to fetch and present the best answers to each individual, in a way that best meets their needs.

So what of the future of search? Personalize online searching will wreak havoc with library assistance. At best, I could look over your shoulder, throwing out suggestions, or we’d each search, then contrast and compare.

Some futurists predict that search will disappear, and that in the near future, artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. While I don’t doubt this will happen, we rarely jump into the future all in one leap. Look around you at our 2009 neighborhoods – while some houses could be inhabited by the Jetsons, many more date to the 1950s or even Victorian times. A good model of the future needs to incorporate lots of old baggage.

A realistic model of information storage and retrieval needs to consider worst as well as best case scenarios. Not adding up the cost of electronic bank statements may save paper but not the environment. There are lots of dystopian futures out there that could seriously interrupt our Internet idylls. Global warming, the demise of petroleum stocks, epidemic – none of it bodes well for electronic access as we know it. All it takes is for the plug to get pulled – no more electricity – and we go from the Jetsons back to the Flintstones. Recent movements such as growing food locally, self-sustainability, and alternative energy and transportation sources are important for librarians to know about, on and off the Internet, into the future. And again, much of the information for these movements is found researching past knowledge, searching backwards, to go forwards.

Now let’s get dystopian dark, let’s look at the monopoly Google is amassing. No longer is the hoard gold or land holdings. It’s information. That includes information about you, which you might consider private. One of the reasons librarians are challenging Google is because it’s dangerous when information is privatized because its use no longer falls under public laws regarding privacy, accessibility or dispersal. But it’s also dangerous when one entity becomes king of the heap. If I were an evil hacker-terrorist-despot, why bother getting the bomb? Go for the fountain of knowledge instead; invade and conquer Google. There are lots of variants to this Google nightmare. What if Google simply disappeared, just wasn’t there tomorrow? What if Google becomes a monopoly of all recorded information? What if Google decided they were tired of being nice and free, now they were going to be tight, mean, and expensive?

Early in this article I used an analogy comparing librarians to early mammals. I did so not because I believe (though I hope) future librarians will grow big and dominate like the mammoths and smilodons of yore, but because things can change, best evidence in history all says they will, and that change can be unpredictable. We’ve been graced by a bubble of time, here in the U.S., free of war, strife and invasion. But civilization is fragile. Rosy futurist scenarios that forget to look at history are arguing the wrong points. The best chance of information survival is not publicity, authority, power, electronic storage or even paper recordings. Our oldest surviving stories were written on clay tablets and buried it in the desert, dependant as much on fluke as human planning for their survival.

I sometimes daydream a potential sci-fi novel, a futurist nightmare scenario, one based on human fallibility. Futurists describe an Internet with limitless choices, brimming with good information. But imagine as years go by, an Internet that accrues some good along with all the bad ads, the false information, the self-aggrandizing websites, the unsigned come-ons, plus information reiterated again and again with no accreditation or date stamp. For a window on what I’m talking about, try searching “acid reflux” on Google. You’ll get some good hits, and hours and hours of pseudo-science. Multiply that times twenty or fifty years.
Let’s also imagine a future where we can’t look back. Libraries are unfunded; the doors locked, the books piled in dusty heaps. Microfiche, floppy discs, CDs abound, but machines to read them no longer exist. 16mm films sit cracked in their canisters. Bureaucrats cut funding for institutional and private databases, directing all pleas for education to the Internet. Why not, it’s free?

Let’s add to that a public that even now, at the height of information availability, is no less susceptible to rumor, is no more insistent on fact than in the past, and is just as likely to believe that because something’s in print, it must be true. The recent debates about healthcare in the U.S. points this out, all ideologies aside. Much of what is being argued and debated is not based on fact.

Add to that the big free library that Google Books promises to become. Only this library is only accessible using Google’s sloppy metadata, as Geoffrey Nunberg makes clear in his article “Google’s Book Search; A Disaster for Scholars.” Misdating, cataloging errors, classification errors abound. Nunberg finds a 46-70 percent error rate on misdating alone, but as he says, “… even if the proportion of misdatings is only 5 percent, the corpus is riddled with hundreds of thousands of erroneous publication dates.”

Voila! A dark ages in the Age of Information, where the litter of useless knowledge impedes search, where falsehoods become truths because they’ve lasted the longest, they’re the top of a hit list, or because a celebrity twittered it. More information will be collected, but equally will it be jettisoned, because of ignorance or expediency. History predicts what gets saved will be things that are most organized, most accessible, and most obviously valuable. And like medieval times, who can access, use, understand and protect information may narrow.

This is truly a worst case scenario. In reality, the future’s more hopeful. If like Nunberg suggests, Google books were to connect with the Library of Congress or OCLC’s metadata on books, we could create a library unrivaled in any other human civilization. Steps to self-monitor or organize information, for example changes in Wikipedia to promote accuracy, may tame the wild frontier we now search. These actions are the duties of future librarians. These organizers probably won’t hold library degrees, or be called librarians – they may not even be people, as artificial intelligence and Web 3.0 mature – but this wrangling of information is the forefront where innovation will occur.

Hopefully we’ll always exist in a place somewhere between information dystopia and utopia, a place that allows enough happy accidents, that there will always be a need for search. The buried doubloons. The lost and refound manuscript. The private collection. Though I’ve defined the future librarian mainly as an organizer, the passion is equally the hunt. And even more than the hunt is the importance of what we serendipitously find along the way. The Internet is great for this. But so is fossil hunting. Forward and backward. We need both.

Truly my greatest fear is a universe where everything is known, the end of search. A GPS connected to RFID tags, so there’s no possibility of hidden treasure, no wondering what happened to Atlantis, or what’s at the center of the Universe. It scares me that that may be the end goal of artificial intelligence, to cut us loose from the weight of the unknown, to free our time from pondering. But for what? So we can play electronic games, plotting, scheming, dreaming– pantomiming search?

the end

Cathy Camper is a librarian for Multnomah County Library, in Portland, OR, where she works in School Corps doing outreach to schools, grades K-12. She has edited recipes for Amy Sedaris’ book I Like You, and published a children’s science book Bugs Before Time; Prehistoric Insects and Their Relatives with Simon and Schuster (2002). Her work has appeared in places such as Wired, Cricket, Cicada, Primavera, Women’s Review of Books, Lambda Book Reports, Utne Reader and Giant Robot. She co-edits a small zine about candy called Sugar Needle. More at www.cathycamper.com

She thanks librarians Gregory Leazer at UCLA, and Wendy Hitchcock, at Lewis and Clark Law School, for their insights and suggestions on this topic.

*Update – NY Judge has delayed hearings in the Google Book Deal – read all about it*

Much of humanity’s knowledge is in the process of being digitized, and a new set of rules are currently in draft-mode concerning how this wealth of knowledge may (or may not) be made available to the public.
If you’ve ever read a book, or wanted to, if you’ve ever searched Google, or dreamed of it, you might want to catch up on the latest developments in our civilization’s fight for access to information. More recently, as physical copies of literature have become less relevant to the public, being able to effectively access their digital counterparts becomes increasingly important. This is an opinion piece, and all of ‘em are mine, the author, so don’t go blaming anybody else if your sensibilities are touched. With that disclaimer made, on with it!

Walking down the street the other day a friend of mine turns to me and asks: Hey, so you work with Google or whatever, what the hell is the big deal? Why am I constantly hearing about this ridiculous company with a childish logo, I mean, it’s just a freaking search box isn’t it?

My response was to pause for a moment in order to consider how I could express to this pre-Internet generation chum what the hell the big deal was. Eventually I responded: Well, I think that search box will come to represent, in a very real way, either human freedom, or a lack thereof.

My friend looked at me, head tilted to one side, incredulity spurting out of the corners of his squinted eyes, and said: never mind. In a manner that clearly portrayed the underlying sentiment: Naoise, you’re an idiot who never learned to answer simple questions with anything but pedantic, complex answers. And while that may be so, in my defense let me just say: c’mooooon, strue! Freedom of search really is related to the larger concept of the freedom of civilization.

There is a real technological divide that meters how freedom of search is doled out to the world’s citizens, and we, as a generation, may be leaving the future of this freedom in the hands of a small group of private, for-profit companies: Google, Microsoft, and quite possibly, Facebook.

Google’s search box, simply because Google themselves seem to be the only ones taking up the reigns and ‘organizing the world’s information’, is quickly becoming our gateway to information and new knowledge. Microsoft wants to compete on the same grounds with a universal search engine, and Facebook wants to redefine how search is perceived, utilizing personal social graph information in order to make that happen.

The Digital Divide, Search & Creating

The most basic staple of modernity, electricity, is an infrastructure issue where the poor are the last to receive access. One of the most basic staples of freedom, access to information, is fast becoming a technology issue, where once again your class dictates both your physical ability to access the information, and often the quality of that access. What it doesn’t limit, for a large portion of what we consider the ‘free world’, is the pool of information which you are allowed to access, that slushy digital sea of knowledge that sits behind the protective, omnipotent, yet wholly opaque search box.

The socioeconomic access-to-information differences don’t only manifest in the extremes – one finds it easy to imagine the poor of India having trouble accessing the Internet – but also in modern western splits. In Canada, 91% of people earning more than $90k per year access the Internet regularly, while only 47% of people earning less than $24k per year (a little above the Canadian poverty line) do the same (source: Statistics Canada). That’s a significant difference in a fully modern first world country. Even in the US, low-income American’s broadband connections decreased 3% from 2007 to 2008, which is hardly a sign of convergence in the digital divide.

A survey taken in May 2008 (warning: PDF file) revealed that 49% of Internet users use a search engine ‘on a typical day’. This is an increase of 69% from January 2002, when the data was first collected. By contrast, the percentage of people who use e-mail ‘on a typical day’ grew only 15%, from 52% to 60% over the same time-frame. Search is used on a daily basis almost as commonly as e-mail, and is growing at a much, much faster rate. We’re addicted to search, and that addiction has yet to even approach maturity.

These increases reflect greater general access to search, greater awareness of search in demographics that already had access, and a habituation of searching amongst those who already have access and awareness. In all cases, search is working its way deeper and deeper into people’s lives, but again, not in an equitable way.

Almost 50% of the American population’s Internet users search on ‘a typical day’, but that number is 66% for college graduates, and only 32% for those who never attended college. The number is 62% for people who earn more than 75K per year, but only 36% for those who earn less than 30K. Part of this is the quality and immediacy of access, which shows people with broadband at home to be significantly more likely to have ever tried using search engines at all, when compared with dial-up users.

The younger generation, of course, is also more habituated to integrate searching online into their daily lives, with 55% of those 18-29 years old searching on a typical day, but only 27% of those 65 or older doing the same. The children are our future, and our future looks pretty saturated in search queries.

So where does this leave us? The concept of search in 2009 is different from our old concepts of information retrieval, and I fear we are moving dangerously close to a common acceptance of the search box as being not only the primary, but the best method to discover knowledge.

I believe it is inevitable that a larger and larger portion of the population will not only integrate search engine use into their daily lives, but invest in search mentally, as a means to knowledge discovery of all types. Knowledge discovery, via access to information, is of course the basis upon which new knowledge is created, and fundamental to the advancement of a civilization. The personal freedom to create is in my opinion (which, hey! I created) an essential aspect of freedom, and is fundamental to the freedom of civilization as a whole to progress in anything that could be considered a natural way.

Within this quest for knowledge lies the almost inconceivable potential of the Internet as we know it, to provide. But it is far from guaranteed that the information the populace at large is given access to will be a full index, free of an intermediary opinion based layer of adulteration (and I do not mean in a ranking sense, but in an inclusion in the index sense). If the index is maintained by a for-profit company, is it unrealistically cynical to think that they will consider their index their property, and appropriate it according to their will, now or in the future? If you managed to come to the conclusion that no, it is not unrealistic, ask yourself this: is it naive to trust the future will of any for-profit company on the basis of their current ideology?

How to Save a Civilization: The Public Library, Unabridged

The idea of harboring or safeguarding the canon of a civilization’s knowledge being essential to the maintenance and cohesion of that civilization is certainly nothing new, and what naturally follows is the necessary freedom to access that information being granted to the populace. Governments have, for many generations, taken responsibility for their citizen’s access to information, if only to guarantee an educated and productive public. For the same reasons inverted, knowledge has long been suppressed by governments, ruling groups and private groups alike in an effort, beyond the obvious economic gains available to those who control production methods, to keep the public passive and unquestioning.

In modern western culture circulating libraries receive public funds to catalogue and make accessible as much common and accepted knowledge as is possible. When new entries to the greater canon of human knowledge grew beyond books and evolved to the point where the ideas only ever knew a digital life, libraries adopted and helped to evolve the early Internet. One of my first real jobs, back in 1997, was for a government program designed to teach people how to use the Internet and how to use search engines effectively, via free access at the public library.

If the world evolves to the point where physical access may eventually fade in importance as ubiquitous access to the Internet becomes the standard, the issue then becomes the nature of the body of information that we do have access to. While it may remain difficult to control access to websites if one knows the URL, it needs to be understood that, essentially, the only form of online information discovery outside of visiting sites you already know (which then link directly to new knowledge), is via search engines.

And what happens when the all-powerful little search box becomes the gateway to more than just the Internet as we currently understand it? When the true canon of human knowledge migrates to ‘The Cloud’, and books are no longer printed and sent to the public library for anyone to access, that little search box takes on a whole new level of importance.

Concentration and Ownership of Knowledge

Google has a stated goal to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”, which taken optimistically, seems almost noble – an image Google has always tried to create for themselves (do no evil = be noble). What is at issue is whether or not “universally accessible” means equitable and identical access without regard for any characteristics of the searcher, be it nationality, location or socioeconomic status. Nobility may be a relative thing.

It is quite obvious that Google does not, in fact, mean this, as they have already capitulated to the Chinese government and censored their search results for Chinese citizens. There is no hope that Google has any intention of being noble in achieving its mission; they have already failed in the name of profit. In a much larger sense, if their mission is to make the world’s information accessible, in suppressing it, they have failed civilization.

While the suppression of human freedom for profit is a tough one to justify, Google has produced rhetoric to do just that. Regardless of their optimism in this being a short-term solution with a goal of greater good in the long run, the suppression of information concerning human suffering only helps to extend and proliferate that suffering, now, in the present – if things change in the future Google will at least have profited in the Interim.

Google are not alone in their transgressions, and in fact are much more up-front about their opinion on the matter, and much more transparent to users about changes to their index that affect search results than their major rivals. Microsoft has also come under fire for similar issues, but in typical Microsoft fashion, they’re just too big and monolithic to really care about the world around them. Recently (june of 2009), Microsoft altered search results clear across the one billion person country of India, to exclude by default sexually explicit content. This is not the same as not displaying sexually explicit content to those who do not request it, but actively blocking it from those who have in fact requested it.

This is the modern world’s version of book burnings and bannings – it takes the form of incomplete, abridged, or adulterated indexes of data behind a corporate search box.

A Brave New Digital World: The Google Books Debacle

Earlier I speculated as to what may happen if the true canon of human knowledge – at the moment more confined to paper and ink than bits and bytes – were to migrate to ‘The Cloud’. If the current store of humanity’s books does go digital it may simply become another catalogue of bytes, which will almost inevitably be controlled by an entity, if not outright owned by it. That human civilization’s knowledge would then also become subject to annihilation by something as ridiculous as the EMP effect of some future solar storm is disconcerting enough. Even if that may be a little far-fetched, it’s certainly not far-fetched to ask the question: if the country’s electricity grid fails, or if brown-outs and blackouts significantly affect our lives, do we want our history, along with news and the ability to search our current world to become something we have technical problems accessing? Or to become something we need to appropriate access to physically, once again with all of the classic problems it presents for equitability?

Beyond the big picture problems of appropriating access-to-(way more)-information to a private company, the Google book deal is riddled with problems. A couple of years ago Google started to develop the concept of digitizing books which have fallen out of copyright protection. This, once again, taken optimistically seems quite noble. But the truth of the matter is that Google has tried to jump the gun. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers both sued Google back in 2005, claiming copyright infringement for their initial digitization and book search efforts. In disentangling itself from these issues Google actually converted the former adversaries to allies, and announced a deal. A new deal. A stunner.

Not only will Google digitize out of copyright books, but also out of print books that are still under copyright – even when those holding the rights to those books don’t specifically agree to Google’s plan. Keep in mind that lots of books go ‘out of print’ just a few years after they’re first published. The reason Google has carte blanche to sell these books is because the Authors guild filed a class-action lawsuit, which would require you as an author to actively opt-out of the settlement if you didn’t like it. By default, if you do nothing, Google can sell your books. Entire sovereign nations have complained, with Germany and France claiming broad copyright issues. So what happens? Google will likely be forced to hide these books from European searchers, once again closing the canon of human knowledge selectively, based on who you are.

An organization called the Open Book Alliance (OBA), along with numerous other entities such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), have taken up the fight against Google. Here’s what the OBA had to say about Google’s attempts:

“The members of the Open Book Alliance recognize the tremendous value that the mass digitization of books can bring to consumers, libraries, scholars and students. Making books searchable, readable and downloadable promises to unlock huge amounts of our collective cultural knowledge for a broader audience than was ever possible.

But, as we’ve noted, this settlement is the wrong way to go about making this promise a reality. The current settlement proposal would stifle innovation and competition in favor of a monopoly over the access, distribution, and pricing of the largest collection of digital books in the world, and would reinforce an already dominant position in search…”

Google has paid more than lip service to the concept of accessibility, in that they plan to provide terminals to all public and university libraries in order to access the Google Book repository free of charge, but as The New Yorker points out:

“The out-of-print books Google has digitized come from nonprofit institutions that built their collections as a public good. In return for pocket change—Google will contribute $125 million to create a nonprofit rights registry—these public treasures will now be monetized for the benefit of a private corporation.

True, Google will give every public and university library one terminal where readers can access its entire collection. But these machines won’t be able to download or print texts—and you can imagine the lines. Libraries that want full access to all the books in Google will have to pay for the privilege, as well as for every download.”

While there is plenty to think about in terms of access to information for the public at large, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is also concerned about your rights as a consumer – in this case, a reader. In the initially proposed Google Book deal, there were absolutely no guarantees that your personal privacy regarding what you read and purchase would be in any way secured. Here’s a quote from a group led by the EFF:

“Google Book Search and other digital book projects will redefine the way people read and research,” said Lethem, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. “Now is the moment to make sure that Google Book Search is as private as the world of physical books. If future readers know that they are leaving a digital trail for others to follow, they may shy away from important intellectual journeys.”

While for you and me, today, this may not be so much of a concern, put yourself in the position of an oppressed Chinese or poor Indian person who may very well shy away from searching and reading specific things for fear of being personally identified in the act, and persecuted for their thoughts and beliefs. This already happens, but it’s only going to get worse if what people are denied access to includes all of the books in the world, not just all of the blogs.

There is no point in ignoring the fact that humans will eventually, inevitably, digitize all past and current knowledge. The problem is it’s happening too fast, while the technology is still misunderstood by our governments, the very entities who should be helping ensure equitable access to information, while the resources to digitize are only truly in the hands of the private corporations of the world, and while the laws of copyright have not yet caught up to the digital age, allowing those corporations to take advantage of, potentially control, potentially privatize, and most certainly profit from, something so sacred as the canon of knowledge of human civilization.

It’s a big deal.