Table Of ContentINVESTIGATING GOOGLE’S
SEARCH ENGINE
Bloomsbury Studies in Digital Cultures
Series Editors
Anthony Mandal and Jenny Kidd
This series responds to a rapidly changing digital world, one which permeates both our
everyday lives and the broader philosophical challenges that accrue in its wake. It is inter-
and trans-disciplinary, situated at the meeting points of the digital humanities, digital media
and cultural studies, and research into digital ethics.
While the series will tackle the ‘digital humanities’ in its broadest sense, its ambition is to
broaden focus beyond areas typically associated with the digital humanities to encompass a
range of approaches to the digital, whether these be digital humanities, digital media studies
or digital arts practice.
Titles in the series
The Trouble With Big Data, Jennifer Edmond, Nicola Horsley, Jörg Lehmann and Mike
Priddy
Queer Data, Kevin Guyan
Hacking in the Humanities, Aaron Mauro
Forthcoming titles
Human Exploits, Cyberpunk and the Digital Humanities, Aaron Mauro
Ambient Stories in Practice and Research, Edited by Amy Spencer
Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel, Spencer Jordan
Herman Melville and the Digital Humanities, Christopher Ohge and Dennis Mischke
Listening In, Toby Heys, David Jackson and Marsha Courneya
People Like You, Sophie Day, Celia Lury and Helen Ward
INVESTIGATING GOOGLE’S
SEARCH ENGINE
ETHICS, ALGORITHMS, AND THE
MACHINES BUILT TO READ US
Rosie Graham
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vi
CONTENTS
List of illustrations x
Acknowledgements xiv
Introduction: Investigating Google’s search engine 1
Google’s dominance 2
The three steps of how search engines work: Crawling, ranking, and
query results 4
Step one: Crawling 4
Step two: Ranking 4
Step three: Query results 8
Five key challenges of studying Google’s search engine 10
One: Multiple actors: Search engine optimization and economic
incentives 11
Two: Moving targets 11
Three: Each search a partial viewpoint 12
Four: No real alternatives 13
Five: The myth of black boxes 14
Chapter outlines 15
Chapter 1: Understanding Google queries and the problem of intentions 16
Chapter 2: Google’s impact on cognition and memory: Histories,
concepts, and technosocial practices 16
Chapter 3: Autocomplete: Stereotypes, biases, and designed discrimination 17
Chapter 4: Google’s search engine results: What is a relevant result? 17
Chapter 5: The real cost of search engines: Digital advertising, linguistic
capitalism, and the rise of fake news 18
Notation and examples 18
1 Understanding Google queries and the problem of intentions 21
Introduction 21
Categorizing how and what people search 23
The roles of search engines and information retrieval’s question of why 24
Query length and the problems of intention 28
All information is ethical: Searching for [food for snakes] 30
Predicting intentions with a lack of information: Plato, Gadamer, and Derrida 32
Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Plato’s fears of deception 35
Google’s algorithms and Derrida’s monster 38
Contents
What kinds of things do people search Google for? 40
Google trends, Brexit, and ‘frantically’ googling after the EU referendum 42
Conclusion 47
2 Google’s impact on cognition and memory: Histories, concepts, and
technosocial practices 49
Introduction 49
Google’s impact on cognition and memory 50
Kinds of recall from extended minds to transactive memory 54
Technosocial memory practices from oral culture to digital literacy 57
The legacy of naturalized technologies 60
Truth and knowledge for Plato 62
Aristotle’s sensory approach 64
Technosocial memory before Google: The Ars Memoria 65
The science and magic of search 68
Treating the mind as technology: Bacon, Hooke, and modern psychology 73
Conclusion 77
3 Autocomplete: Stereotypes, biases, and designed discrimination 79
Introduction 79
The desire for a digital oracle 82
Autocomplete’s minimal academic attention 85
The biases of Autocomplete: Stereotypes and discrimination 88
Predicting and shaping user attitudes: The origins of Autocomplete 93
So, how does Autocomplete operate? 95
Second-order stereotyping: Sexist suggestions for female scientists 97
RankBrain and the biases of machine learning 104
Automated misogyny for every individual 113
Speed 116
Speed and judgement: Time to reflect 120
Conclusion 126
4 Google’s search engine results: What is a relevant result? 129
Introduction 129
‘Quantifiable signals’ and Malawian witch doctors 131
What should search engine results be? 132
The Idealists: Search is democratic, relevance can be measured
objectively, and answers can exist independently of bias 134
The difficulty with measuring relevance 136
The Contextualists: Search is undemocratic, relevance is a measure of
personalization, and all answers are inherently biased 139
Are search results personalized? 141
viii
Contents
Methodological challenges of studying search engines 143
Particular considerations for collecting search engine results 144
Variables that matter: Search experiments in 2015, 2017, and 2021 146
The rationale behind focusing on same-sex sexual orientation 146
Queries used 148
Capturing the spread of results from the first page 149
Evaluation method 150
Google’s public position on how they provide results 150
Summary of 2015 results 155
How do variations in terminology and phrasing alter search results? 161
Unimaginable communities 166
How search results change throughout time: 2015, 2017, and 2021 167
Longitudinal overview: Official languages in each domain 168
Terminology throughout time: ‘Homosexual’ versus ‘gay’ 173
Phrasing throughout time: ‘Good’ versus ‘wrong’ 177
Conclusion 179
5 The real cost of search engines: Digital advertising, linguistic
capitalism, and the rise of fake news 181
Introduction 181
The economics of google 182
The context of post-Fordism 184
AdWords: Organic versus sponsored results 185
AdWords: The multilingual linguistic market and an economy of bias 187
Google’s institutionalization, data collection, and advertising 191
AdWords in the context of ‘The Magic System’ 193
AdWords and the general intellect 195
The economic profits of discrimination 197
Private profits and public losses 200
Google’s international expansion 202
AdSense and post-Fordism: The cost of Google’s billboards 203
AdSense and fake news in the 2016 US presidential election 204
The reciprocal relationship between AdSense and Facebook 207
Conclusion 211
Conclusion: What if search engines were actually built to benefit users? 213
Bibliography 217
Index 234
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