I Have a Crush on This Company

PHUTATORIUS
I do. I have a crush on Google, notwithstanding that they failed to give me a job and are therefore necessarily condemned to fail and go under in the future — most likely as a result of a lousy judgment call by someone in the company's legal department.

All right, Phutsie. Take a deep breath. Inhale deeply, now exhale.

(sigh!)
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Now pull yourself together and continue.

All right. I can do this. I can. The latest (if not the greatest) insurgency bubbling up from the guerrillas in Mountain View is Google Voice, a free service that will allow subscribers to choose a central Google-based phone number. Calls to the Google number will ring all your other phones (or as many as you associate with the Google number), simultaneously. Users can have voice mails left on the Google number forwarded to them in email, and the grafting of speech-to-text technology onto this service will enable full-text searching of voice mail. Pretty cool.

Cue the Privacy People to come in and warn us about Google gathering even more of our information: they'll know who called you, they'll have recordings of the messages you left. You know, just like all the phone companies do now. Ooh: scary. The Privacy People may have a point that Google's many products afford it an unprecedented amount of information with which it could build a profile of you if it so chose. But geez: if your phone company is your ISP, they may have a log of the websites you visit. And if your phone company handles your email, they may store copies of your messages on their servers, too. What makes Google any more insidious and terrifying than The Phone Company?

We do have privacy laws (most notably the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act), after all — and phone calls and voice mail messages stored, routed, and delivered via Google Voice will be just as subject to these laws as anybody else. Oh, sure, maybe they are rumbling about planting gigantic server-barges in international waters, but whatever. I'm increasingly convinced that since the GMail data-mining PR fiasco — itself a whole lot of sound and fury that ultimately didn't signify much — Privacy People are hard-wired to give reflexive warnings about Big Brother every time Google releases a product. But then again, I'm starry-eyed, love-lorn, and probably not capable of objectivity on this question.

Yes, But Do We WANT Personalized Web Search?

PHUTATORIUS
Google Inc.'s VP of Search Marissa Meyer is touting "personalized search" as the wave of the future. Sounds good, but what's it all mean? Google's celebrated web search algorithm orders search results based on the cumulative wisdom — well, preference, anyway — of the masses who have already entered the search string, reviewed the results and clicked through to what looks good. Imagine the Internet as a vast woods, with the world's Net users wandering around, breaking the ground cover with their feet. Google's current search model channels people down the well-worn trails: this is most likely the site you're after, because other folks with the same interest went here.

Of course, what I want and what some cobbled-together notion of the Typical Websurfer wants aren't always going to be the same. So Google proposes a further step: tailor Web Search to custom-order search results based on what I, and not the Google Golem, want to see.

As one incremental step toward that Shangri-La of Search, Google has launched "SearchWiki," a product that allows a user to adjust the order of search results per his or her own specifications. Those preferences will be recorded in the user's personal account with Google, for regurgitation at a later date, if the user should re-enter the same search string. Users can also tag their own Wiki-style comments to search results.

Personalized search sounds pretty terrific. It sounds like Google getting even better at what they do than they already are. So hooray. But here's my beef. I think there's something to the notion that we'll be worse off — both individually and as a community — if the 'Net gets so smart that it gives each of us exactly what he/she wants, nothing more or less, all of the time. Distractions and diversions are abundant in this world, and they surely dissipate our energies and make our days less efficient. Take, for example, the television that sits just over my right shoulder as I type right now. It's showing news footage of an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at the President of the United States, and it's completely shattered my concentration. This is a bad thing.

On the other hand, there's news footage on the television, right now, of an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at George W. Bush. Are you kidding me? As distracted as I find myself right now, this television is enriching my life. And I believe there's something to be said for not having complete sovereign control over the information one receives. We hear quite a lot these days about the political polarization of our news sources, and how we all choose to live among and spend time with like-minded people who don't challenge our worldviews. It's socially and intellectually calcifying. Now imagine an Internet that anticipates your needs and meets them completely. I mean, ick, right?

I like the idea that I might be allowed to stumble across something I didn't ask to see, that I might be surprised, that I might see/learn/find something I've never experienced before — and that it might cause me to see the world a bit differently, to grow as a person, to find a capacity for empathy that I didn't know I had. In fact, I think it's important. It's the diversions, the digressions — dare I say it? — the hijackings that enrich our lives. They lure us out of our carved-out personal spaces into the broader community. Take, for example, Gmail, which serves up ads based on keywords I type into emails. This was supposedly creepy — Google's machines reading my emails. But human eyes aren't processing the content of my message: this much is clear from the fact that sponsored links to Human Events and WorldNetDaily often appear after I've sent off a blistering screed to M'dates and V'torix about politics. Anyone who read the message would know Human Events and WorldNetDaily aren't at all up my alley. Clearly the Gmail ad server isn't "smart" enough. But if it were, I wouldn't have the benefit of knowing that these publications exist, that they say such ludicrous and laughable things, and that there are people out there who swear by them. Knowing all this is good for me. It's important.

Do I think SearchWiki is going to destroy communities? Hardly. Google proposes to publish the Wiki commentaries — users can rate, describe, and review sites to one another. This functionality arguably enhances community. And technology that has the simple effect of saving prior search strings seems harmless enough. What I don't like is the down-the-road ideal of search personalization. I don't want a search engine to anticipate my needs perfectly. I want a rough idea of what I am after, delivered alongside other, miles-afield links that carry the potential for great distraction and enlightenment. So much of the joy in life comes in the searching, after all. Just don't make it too easy, Google.