I realize that what we’re trying to do with the web is essentially create an informational feed which sprays all data directly into our brains immediately. I realize that we’re fast outstripping even our ability to process the amount of information coming to us in a a classic sense, or in any way compete with the massive overload we deal with every day. I realize that we’re a very immediate society, which thrives not just just on information, but also instant information processing. All that said, this Google Instant™ rollout is kind of a non-event. Let me rephrase that; it’s an event which demonstrates Google’s vested interests and is immediately irrelevant.
Backstory: Earlier today at work I noticed that the web had gone crazy. As I was typing, my results were changing Instant™ly, so a stream of info was constantly moving below my search bar, like, as I was typing. I turned to Josh and told him that something cool was happening, and he called it Google Instant™ like it was no big deal, as if he’d seen it a million times. It seemed like the web was coming unglued, and for a moment I felt the world turn, ever so slightly. Then I didn’t use it at all for the entire day.
Google claims that it’s a big deal because they’ve done studies and we read faster than we write and blah blah blah, but actually they just did it because it looks cool and it was just a few jumps away from the suggestion bar, which has been a smash. If you aren’t familiar with what Instant™ does, it basically just performs the suggestion bar for all your results, so it gives you results you don’t want (and probably won’t read) while you’re on your way to the results you do want. You don’t even have to hit return! Pinkies all over the world salute you, Google. Why would you use this service? Well first off, let’s just say, hypothetically, that you are actually going to Google’s site as opposed to using your browser’s nifty search bar, or even the highlight- right click- Google function. Okay, so you’re on Google’s site and you’re doing an old fashioned web search. So you type in “web search”, but actually you wanted to know more about the extraneous information related to “web sea” without even asking for it. BOOM- you got it. Even better, you can scroll through the suggestions to find out what each of the affiliate sites is up to. Oh, wait you just wanted to know about web searches. Okay, you can do that too, but all the web sea info is there, just in case you want to know about it. Great, huh? I could understand using the technology a lot if you were really super indecisive, or if you had only one piece of information and no other piece of information to tie it to. Or maybe just zero direction, just aimlessly wandering the data fields looking for something about “samurai”.
Generally I find this isn’t the case. I rarely, if ever type in just one search term, frequently producing like, an entire string of words which highly resemble a fully reasoned thought, or a contextual idea, transition words and all. This is shocking because it implies that the producer may be a reasoning human being, as opposed to a yearning, easily distracted machine which knows not why (or what) it wants. In fact I usually find myself dumbing down my question for the machine, which doesn’t understand exactly what I mean in even the way a child could (yet). The algorithm suggesting the things I might be interested in is usually wrong even though it’s gathered information on me roughly 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, for the past 2 years. Now, were we co-workers, a bad tip occasionally would be understood, or even expected, but that’s okay because people are just people, and we’re all doing our own thing, you can’t expect everybody to be perfect all the time, etc. Google, however, all day, everyday misreads me, constantly producing suggestions I don’t take, and even worse, it knows about them, and keeps doing it. The worst part is, they don’t have anything else to do. Google doesn’t go camping on the weekends, it’s not it’s sister’s birthday, it doesn’t have a big party coming up, and it didn’t meet someone really special last night: it’s got time to figure me out. But it hasn’t, which is indicative of the fact that it’s really just an alphanumeric rubric behind there, and it’s a rubric which favors certain types of results, chiefest among them being Google.
It’s attractive for a marketing firm to market themselves, it’s like, one of the original no-brainers. But what if that marketing firm is actually selling a directory to all the information on earth? What if Webster’s definition of a dictionary included definitions exclusive to that dictionary? What if the Encyclopedia Britannica listed itself as the only encyclopedia admissible in court? Google gathering information on us and pointing us in the direction it wants us to go in shapes the future of the web and how the web grows, which when dealt with realistically, is obviously the future of informational organization. The grading rubric will, upon repeated trials, shape the writer of the paper. So should we be satisfied with Google as our grader, when it seems perfectly content to bring us more bad results faster? Do we have other options, different search engines which we maybe like more?
I dunno, Google it. Instant™ly.