Society of the Query conference: 13 - 14 November, Trouw Amsterdam in Amsterdam
With the Society of the Query conference -stop searching, start questioning-, the Institute of Network Cultures aims to critically reflect on the information society and the dominant role of the search engine in our culture. What does the dependency on the engine to manage the complex system of knowledge on the Internet mean? What alternatives exist? How can the increasingly centralized web be regulated? What is the future of interface design? By bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, the conference will examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design.

Introduction
Search is the way we now live. At present, the reality of the information society is one in which we are increasingly confined to the use of information retrieval tools to create order and value in the vast amount of online data. Web search has taken over from (directory based) browsing and surfing as the dominant activity on the web. With this development, the search engine has become the main point of reference, one whose emphasis on efficiency and service tends to cloud the nature of both the underlying technology and (corporate) ideologies.

In what might be dubbed the ‘society of the query’, this conference asks what this dependency on tools to manage the complex system of knowledge on the Internet means for our culture. As the idea of a semantic web unfolds, the human versus artificial intelligence controversy is regarded with renewed urgency. The increasingly centralized computing grid invites critical questions about power distribution, governance, and diversity and accessibility of web content, while on the other hand promising alternatives to the dominant paradigm arise in P2P and open source initiatives. With large investments in media literacy, what role might politics and education play in establishing an informed and technologically literate user base?

This two-day Query conference aims to examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and to contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design. The Institute of Network Cultures aims to do so specifically by bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, creating room for speculation and open questions, as well as concrete projects and research. The questions this conference raises are:

• How does the idea of machine understanding influence the fields of knowledge organization and information retrieval?
• How is the legal framework surrounding search engines changing shape?
• Is Google’s increased ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of art and cultural practice?
• What influence does the existing hegemony of a few large search engines exert on the traditional flow of knowledge and the diversity and accessibility of web content, and in what way might regulation be possible?
• Considering developments in the fields of art and information architecture, how can we get to more sophisticated ways of interface design and the presentation of search results?
• What alternative ways of search are visible on the software level, the network level and the user level that challenge the engine as the major search paradigm?

Conference themes

• Critique of the Information Society
• Digital Civil Rights and Media Literacy
• Art and the Engine
• Politics and Regulation
• Interface Design and Data Presentation
• Alternative Search
• Project Showcase

(illustration by anne helmond)

Descartes, R. (1644) Principia Philosophiae

On February 18th, I attended the workshop ‘Abstract Images in Art and Science’ at Utrecht University, organized by dr. Ann-Sophie Lehmann, prof. dr. Paul Ziche, and Pim Verlaek as a cooperation between the Descartes Centre and the Visualisations Group of the Centre for Humanities. The Visualisations Group explores interdisciplinary approaches to the study of images and visual culture, and aims to connect researchers whose work is related to visual culture and the intersections between art and science.

The main goal of the workshop was to create dialogue between different scientific cultures that deal with the issue of abstraction. To this end the scientific background of the contributors ranged widely, from art history to the history of science, from computer science to logics, and from philosophy to media studies. Throughout the workshop, it would become clear that each scientific field not only came with a specific take on abstraction, but with a specific approach to bringing the point across. Dialogue in this sense was certainly facilitated; translation of concepts was often needed and added to a more concrete outcome for an interdisciplinary audience of students and professors.

The main problems that are encountered when studying the history of scientific images were addressed in the first lecture by prof. dr. Christoph Lüthy (dept. of philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen). In the presentation “Words, Lines, Diagrams, Images: Towards a History of Scientific Imagery” he states that today’s science is very pictorial, judging by the new kinds of imagery found in contemporary science glossies. But what is the status of these images? Following the reasoning of art historian Martin Kemp, Lüthy argues that we are the heirs of renaissance revolution, both in our notion of science and our assets of visual tools. Historically, there are no criteria to distinguish images from non-images, and as similar imagery moves across centuries it is impossible to produce a stable taxonomy. The converse is true as well; comparable objects or processes are being expressed by extremely dissimilar visual means. Lüthy concludes that the meaning of a given image can only be grasped in the context of the epistemological, metaphysical and social assumptions within which it is embedded.

The impossibility of understanding images either supra-temporally or, for that matter, ‘instantly’, turned out to be a recurrent theme among the morning presentations. In a formula-dense presentation called “Why do we have 2+3 = 3 +2 and 2 x 3 = 3 x 2?” logician prof. dr. Albert Visser (Utrecht University) illustrated the explanatory role of mathematical abstraction in acausal situations. He did so by addressing the (among logicians quite famous) case of the commutativity of addition and multiplication. In order to try to understand this fact, a general abstract pattern needed to be found that was applicable to both addition and multiplication. By using various examples Visser showed that most approaches merely increase confusion, but one is extremely helpful: Category Theory is concerned with mathematical structures and the relationships between them. Outcomes are consistently expressed in abstract diagrams showing connections of sets to other sets, by functions. This mode of gigantic generalization shows that addition and multiplication are, in essence, inverted instances of the same operation.

It is tempting to say that abstract diagrams facilitate a certain instant clarity, allowing the viewer to see relations and find meaning ‘in a glance’. As indicated by the last speaker, such seems possible only after lengthy conversations in advance. Not only immersion in the subject at hand, but also changing cognitive abilities play a role in the way abstract images are used and perceived.

Starting from a completely different background, art critic, editor and science historian dr. Julia Voss illustrated a similar point in “Picturing the Invisible: Charles Darwin’s Evolutionary Diagrams”. When sketching his evolutionary theory for the first time in 1837, Darwin drew a picture in his notebook. After writing “I think”, he sketched a diagram that expressed both time and difference. Voss’s claim is that Darwin compiled his diagram from several others that were around in his time. He combined their various levels of abstraction, but added a temporal factor that we are used to nowadays (in fact, we are conditioned to understand tree-like diagrams in an evolutionary mode) though in Darwin’s time was unheard of. It took Darwin the whole of eleven pages to explain the diagram when it appeared as the only illustration in his 1859 “On the Origin of Species”.

After lunch, the audience gathered for two more rounds of presentations. In general, the afternoon focused on the production of the image itself as a scientific product. Since the advent of photography, we have learned to distinguish between generative images (computer or otherwise generated) and pictorial or indexical ones. The latter aren’t often termed scientific, and vice versa. The afternoon lectures were to address this fact from various perspectives.

In his talk “Photographs and Abstract Images. On a Fallacious Confidence in Photography”, philosopher Rob van Gerwen introduced the concept of the abstract photograph. A challenging term, as photographs are usually the images in contrast to which certain other images are said to be abstract. In Van Gerwen’s view however, photographs are in fact abstract when things have been left out that require us to make use of external aspects or knowledge about a setting to come to an understanding of the image. Abstract photographs in fact often depict people; here it is the ‘moral space’ of the subject that is removed by neutralizing ‘address’ - the viewer is not, or merely circumstantially, addressed. Leaving out this moral space allows a photograph to become iconic for a broader situation instead of merely depicting a particular subject’s ‘this, here, now’. Iconic photographs of disasters, such as the Vietnam War, or the student protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, are such examples.

In the discussion following the talk someone asked whether the word ‘abstract’ in the title was merely there for the purpose of the workshop. In other words, would the concept survive outside of this context? Van Gerwen replied that the photographs commit to the concept of abstraction that seems to cross the disciplinary boundaries; 1) leaving something out (moral space or other aspects) and 2) requires us to make use of other aspects to understand. Harking back to the morning lectures; only when you have a theory in place can you read these images. Co-organizer Paul Ziche remarked that the challenge might be in how to arrive at a new property to understand particular situations.

Prof. dr. Frank Kessler (Media and Culture, Utrecht University) went on to discuss the use of moving images in science, in the late 19th and early 20th century. Chronophotography made images move by placing photographs in sequence. The technique has been very influential as a practical scientific method, based on the undeniable ‘truth’ of photographic rendering. The documentary quality of photography and early filmic experiments was foregrounded in ethnographic and medical studies, and was of great use as an analytical instrument for the study of movement by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, who translated photographs and movement into diagrams and graphs displaying the specifics of movement over distance and time.

After the coffee break, the two remaining talks moved on to the subject of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Computer scientist dr. Peter Hall (University of Bath) presented “Is a functional picture aesthetic?”. Researching computer vision, Hall’s job is to get computers to ‘understand’ figurative images. Specifically, he designs programs that after input of a photograph synthesize 
”semi-figurative art”, like children’s drawings, 20th century 
Western art, Oriental art, cartoons and animation. This process involves transforming visual data into a meaningful 
language, using a full range of abstract images like graphs and scatter plots. Functional images help to understand what computers are doing, and at the same time help out computers understand the figurative images. All of this leads Hall to suppose there is a deep relation between abstraction, recognition, and 
aesthetics.

In the final presentation, “Non-Photorealistic Renderings as Epistemic Images”, Pim Verlaek continued on the line of thought introduced by Peter Hall, while addressing the broader academic context of CGI. Specifically, Verlaek makes a case for non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) as a field of its own and a distinct epistemic style, as opposed to the ‘holy grail’ of photorealistic rendering. Used more often to communicate information effectively, than to be of artistic value, NPR functions as a form of abstraction. As the creation of images is often based on cognitive perceptual models, NPR can be said not only to abstract photographic representation, but also knowledge about vision and cognition. Highlighting the epistemic character of NPR imagery, Verlaek aimed to interest academic disciplines such as art history, media studies and visual studies in this relatively new topic within the field of computer graphics.

Throughout history, illustrators often refrain to state their intentions. As Christoph Lüthy indicated in the first presentation of the day, clashes of conventions are important means to get closer to the acceptance of certain explanations. With this wide array of speakers, the workshop coordinators organized a minor convention clash, bringing us a little bit closer to a model of abstraction that may help us understand how images work.

Descartes Centre
Centre for Humanities, Utrecht University

Faced with the challenge of sustaining innovation in the networked economy, management strategies appear that introduce elements of play to the work place. In 2007 IBM initiated research on the way corporate leaders may learn from leadership within Massively Online Role Playing Games, resulting in the suggested transfer of several features of the game GUI to the work place. This paper aims to highlight the problematic aspects of this research and its acclaimed practical use, arguing for critical reflection on the overall possibility and consequence of transferring technological features from a specifically coded game environment to a corporate setting.

Content BLIK 2.1

Session 2: Search Engines and Power

Theo Röhle – Dissecting the Gatekeepers

Theo Röhle is a PhD candidate in media culture at Hamburg University. His dissertation seeks to establish Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Foucauldian concepts of power within search engine research.

Where does the power of a search engine exist? One position of power is established in everyday discourse through images of anxiety and fear. Giving power a face however, tends to obscure the complex relations underlying it. As ANT suggests, there is no fixed source of power, just a temporary stabilization of a network.

Defining the actors in the power network, Röhle locates the search engine as intermediary between user and transparency, and between webmaster and attention. As Google enters the picture, it diverts all actions through its own network. From an ANT perspective, this makes Google the obligatory passage point for both user and webmaster.

Instead of being a mere passage point, translation takes place. The PageRank algorithm establishes a shareholder democracy, where Google sees itself in charge of the interests of the Internet community. Furthermore, by providing a host of free webmaster tools and services, developers get associated and enrolled to index content that Google would otherwise not reach.

Through this enrollment webmasters enter Google’s disciplinary regime. Sites that do not comply with Google’s rules and standards get punished by banishment, and webmasters are encouraged to report them.

A second regime Röhle identifies is governmental, and based on the prediction of user behavior. In a manner of ‘risk management’ Google aims to gather intimate knowledge of people, in order to adapt its own behavior accordingly. A search engine, according to Röhle, is not primarily a tool to find information. It is an advertising system, translating user’s information needs into consumption needs.

One strategy to take would be to challenge the paradigm of technological closure. Links to privacy regulation are lost from the interface, while its minimal design falsely inspires a feeling of transparency. Furthermore, the right that commercial parties have on the use of our search data should be renegotiated.

Bernhard Rieder - Democratizing Search: Concepts and Challenges

Bernhard Rieder is assistant professor at the Département Hypermédia at the Université de Paris VIII. His research focuses on the theory, critique, and implementation of the concept of “delegation”.

The larger shift from information scarcity to information abundance has given filtering processes priority over distribution processes. This development emphasizes the increased importance of making judgments. Compared to earlier search technologies, web search is significantly different: It takes the human out of the domain of knowledge, in favor of the incessant, brainless crawlers.

The dominant ranking paradigm on the web being recursive link analysis (PageRank), guiding principles are popularity (the logic of the hit) and convenience. Commercial interests in the search market guide attention in the direction of already dominant sources and views on the web, leaving a large number of sites invisible.

One of the strategies challenging this paradigm over the last few years is that of Wikia Search, a service that applies the Wikipedia principles of transparency, community, quality and privacy to search. Wikia Search is open source, it uses distributed crawling and relies on user feedback on search results. As the technology is still in beta, it remains unclear how this voting principle will unfold. Will the SEO and advertisement industry come in, and, in general, is there a ‘right way’ to present results?

Plurality, Rieder argues, is more important than transparency. Conflict, or lack of consensus need not stand in the way of living together between civil rights and normative decision-making.

The main challenges for democratizing search are the costs of infrastructure, quantifiable markers for ranking, and changing user habits versus software defaults. There is no easy solution, but elements of one can be found at the user, provider and interface level.

On the user side, searching skills and politics, the practice and politics of linking, and general informational ecology should be part of our education system. On the provider side, the focus should be on antitrust measures and the building of a public infrastructure based on crawling and linking.

On the interface level, Rieder notes several promising developments, such as natural language processing, advanced search initiatives, clustered search, and sliders to define the popularity-level of ranking. In general, we need better APIs and larger result sets, more insight in search habits and in the consequences of ranking, and a better conceptual grasp on search engines.

Rieder concludes with a call for getting people back in the loop, hybrid, plural and complex as they are.

Session 3: Making Things Visible

Richard Rogers - Deep Methods for the Info-Political Study of Search Engines

Richard Rogers is Chair in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Govcom.org foundation.

After an introduction to the panel by Katja Mayer, Richard Rogers introduced the Amsterdam-based Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), a collaboration of Media Studies University of Amsterdam and Govcom.org Foundation. At DMI, researchers and programmers focus on developing research methods fitting to the technical specificities of new media.

When relating Digital Methods to the 1990s Virtual Methods research program, their different approaches originate from a different perspective on the relationship between the virtual and society. Whereas Virtual Methods focused on the embeddedness of the virtual in society, Digital Methods coined the term digital groundedness to research and demonstrate the way society is embedded within digital objects.

Rogers went on to compare and describe several methods to research ‘natively digital objects’ such as the link, the website, the engine and the sphere.

Looking at the research of links, social network analysis has been applied to the Internet fairly recently, studying the way websites or people are positioned within a network. Link studies by Digital Methods focus on Google’s view of links as votes. Through tools such as the IssueCrawler, a software tool that visualizes and localizes networks on the web, actors can be characterized and profiled based on their incoming and outgoing links.

Websites are commonly studied from a usability point of view or a SEO point of view, and site features can be judged, for instance, on their level of interactivity. An alternative approach would be to follow the medium and focus on the website as an archived object. Digital Methods uses the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine for this purpose, which privileges single site histories. The Google Politics of Tabs movie, online here, illustrates the methodology well.

It seems that googlization has made the engine an object for mass media critique and surveillance studies. The Digital Methods approach to study engines consists of capturing and saving search results, making it possible to look into ranking of a site or issue through time. The Issue Dramaturg was built to demonstrate the ‘drama’ behind information retrieval. Also, it uses a ‘Lipmannian device’ that queries the first hundred results for keywords on a certain issue - how far is it from the ‘top of the web’?

Spheres, finally, such as the blogosphere, often find there way into genre studies. Digital Methods sees spheres as demarcated areas, constructed by engines such as Google News (newssphere), or Technorati (tagosphere). It then becomes interesting to study and compare the prominence of certain issues within the various spheres.

Gon Zifroni & Tsila Hassine – Multipolar Search

Gon Zifroni is a designer and researcher at Metahaven Amsterdam, Tsila Hassine is an information artist and developer. Together they work on the Exodus search project.

Tsila Hassine kicked off by discussing several strategies to overcome the dominant ranking paradigm by web search engines, and the list as the dominant presentational metaphor.

Shmoogle.org could be Google’s best friend. Shmoogle allows you to perform a Google search, while losing the political and industrial weight of ranking. Google search results are presented randomly in a lengthy list without page breaks, advertising or hierarchy. Hassine notes that the design decisions made here are promoting the transparency of Google, and the access to web sites that hardly get found. The Shmoogle mechanism is one of pulling instead of pushing, ultimately leading to a broader web.

Another option to read information differently is to be creative with temporal organization. The IMAGE TRACER for instance, developed by Hassine herself and De Geuzen, archives Google image searches to track urls, appearance, disappearance and ranking through time. Saving images and metadata on a local server, a change of organization over time can be visualized.

Gon Zifroni then elaborated on networks and hierarchy. The scale-free character of the web promotes a ‘rich get richer’ mechanism, and network power is dispersed to the next connection. Linking within a community of consenting actors is an inward movement, which, on a network level, leads to disconnection.

Following this theory of ‘abundance of redundant relations’, Zifroni suggests a focus on the holes between high-density areas. These are more defining for their relation than links, and indicative of negative social capital. It is very hard to define a community on the web in a traditional understanding of borders, which is in turn promoted by search engine workings.

Zifroni proposes a theory about periphery, rather than the center. Attention should be called to the ‘bridging nodes’ in the network, the ones that are at the margin of clusters but might connect distinct spheres. With the Exodus research project, Hassine, Zifroni and others are looking at the periphery of information. As hubs and clusters exist on different scales, bridging across these scales will become highly important.

Discussion

The conference organizers had reserved the total of an hour for a plenary end discussion, turning out to be quite productive.

Aside from the mention of Wikia Search, the P2P alternative did not receive much attention in today’s talks but got elaborated on in the closing discussion. In terms of speed, the P2P engine will long remain in Google’s shadow. Tsila Hassine noted however, that regarding the quality of information we are looking for, it is far more interesting to think in terms of choice than in terms of speed. The idea of having several alternative models of search running in the background for specific searches is promising, considering developments such as Open Search and the Minerva distributed search project by the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik.

Another subject not surfacing until the closing discussion was semantic search. In line with his earlier presentation, Paul Duguid argued that with search tools such as grep, we have moved into syntactic search, ignoring semantics. With information drawn from well informed sources, semantics would follow from the context. However, we move further and further away from that. Bernhard Rieder adds that not each resource is equally biased. Even in a list, we will find some way of consensus about value. Semantic search on the other hand, can give us something better than truth. Promising experiments are being done with experts classifying resources in folder structures, by way of a ‘soft ontology’.

An interesting remark made by an audience member, was that when we compare the industrial revolution to the information revolution, people saw their workforce institutionalized in the first. One of the speakers mentioned earlier that holding people together and engaging them in a struggle is very tough. According to Paul Duguid, the word user community gives a nice impression of a community united, but it is not, there is no collective user base. This fact also frustrates government intervention, as it is unclear on whose behalf it is acting. Furthermore, a significant difference between the US and Europe exists in a reversal of trust and mistrust put in institutions such as governments and corporations. The thought of a third party, a union or a body to lobby on a higher level could indeed be promising lest it, as Theo Röhle added, be less commercial and more political.

On the subject of organization, Richard Rogers noted to be glad not to have heard about the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ today. In contemplating what else to do with ‘everyone’, he expressed his faith in a shift from the panoptic to the synoptic model, in other words, to have many watchdogs watch the watchers.

With education coming up in most critical discussions on the future of search, the last subject of interest in the closing discussion was media literacy. It was suggested that, on the European level, media education is not a big issue. This thought was countered by Van Hoboken, noting that media literacy is in fact high on the European agenda. Indeed, it could be more prominently so and include more critical perspectives. Duguid mentioned that all sorts of literacy are taught in the American educational system, but the term media literacy is completely unclear. The notion changes with every decade; first off as ‘cultural literacy’, then ‘computer literacy’ and now ‘media literacy’. Education is very important, but literacy standards lead to shaky ground.

Publication

A publication following the conference is expected to appear in a couple of months.

As this will be a rather full report, I will post it in two parts. Be sure to keep an eye on the conference website, as the organizers promise to make a full video archive of the conference speeches available soon.

Keynotes

Paul Duguid - The World According to Grep: Both Sides of the Search Revolution

After a timely start and a word of welcome, Konrad Becker introduced the first speaker of the event: Paul Duguid, former consultant at Xerox PARC (1989-2001) and author of The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Currently, Duguid teaches History of Information and Quality of Information at the University of California in Berkeley.

Faced with the ambitious task of giving a broad historical overview of information in 45 minutes, Paul Duguid set off at a strong pace. Taking Latour’s immutable mobiles as a theoretical base, his talk aimed to break the idea of information as a constant notion throughout history. What was the world like when we searched through analogue means, and how to define the quality of results?

Duguid emphasized the importance of storage to the nature of search. Throughout history we have seen selection criteria change with storage space and information carriers. The codex, eventually, brought classification, indexes and swift distribution. The invention of the printing press rendered us with multiple and reliable copies. Across time, collections arose that were in fact selections, defined in an institutional and social context.

How does one judge quality? Is the original always better, do things get better over time, or are both positions true? This is the problem of the immutable mobile. Information does not speak for itself. Paper is often regarded as irrelevant to news, but it is ignorant to neglect the way we have historically used paper to constrain and select our news. It is important to recognize the integrity of the material as the context of information, it is not free standing or autonomous. We have always relied on institutions to guide us, and removing those constraints leads to uncertainty.

Furthermore, Duguid indicates, it is important to see where the power gets distributed to. Google and the advertisers define our information. There is one traditional institution that we see gaining some sort of power: the university. Alliance to a university, for Google as well as the individual, adds value. In the search for authority however, seeing old institutions made new again should be called problematic, rather than progress.

Claire Lobet-Maris - From Trust to Tracks

Next up was Claire Lobet-Maris, professor at the Computer Science Institute of the University of Namur, and co-director of CITA (Cellule Interfacultaire de Technology Assessment).

Technology Assessment (TA) studies and evaluates new technologies, based on the premise that society has a right to scrutinize their development and investigate possible ethical implications. As Lobet-Maris explained, first generation TA (70’s) was strongly fed by determinism and a sharp distinction between experts and public. Second generation TA came to regard technology predominantly as a social construct. Currently, Lobet-Maris claimed, a third generation of ‘militant and value oriented’ TA is emerging, that aims to increase social responsibility, as well as to open up the political scripts through which technologies actively shape society.

The issues raised by search engines from a TA perspective, concentrate around democracy, autonomy and regulation. Looking at search engines and democracy, Lobet-Maris identifies issues such as the equity of chance to exist on the web, the diversity and richness of public space as a public sphere, and transparency of the indexing and ranking metrics.

Regulation might take place in a number of ways. A market approach of regulating web operators is mentioned, although Lobet-Maris feels the distortion of information is too large a risk. Network regulation, where a trusted social network plays an intermediary role, is already common in the web sphere. However, the practice gives rise to socio-political questions and causes social fragmentation of the web sphere. The way to go in protecting democracy, Lobet-Maris argues, is state responsibility. As the Geneva declaration mentions, the web is a public global good. While the state has a responsibility to protect diversity and minority, such is difficult to endorse. Lobet-Maris suggests a ‘labeling’ of search engines by transparency, and the initiation of R&D projects that are based on democratic search metrics and the stimulation of market competition.

From the perspective of autonomy, Lobet-Maris addresses contextualization and personalization of information. Silent and non-transparent profiling creates an ‘iron numerical cage’ around the user, making it difficult to shape and manage one’s numerical track across the web and the narrative that consequently unfolds.

As these issues are traditionally addressed by a legal framework, finding new paths is important. State regulation in this respect seems the least viable option, as strong liberalization and globalization frustrate the application of laws. Market regulation based on ‘informed consent’ also fails, as the better part of Internet users does not read the terms of agreement. The third alternative Lobet-Maris sees, is based on the technological empowerment of citizens: Give people the technological capacity to manage and reset their profiles, and restore intellectual rights on their social identity.

Session 1: Search Engines and Civil Liberties

Gerald Reischl – Inside the Google Trap

Gerald Reischl is a Viennese journalist, writing for the technology section of the Austrian KURIER newspaper, and author of the book Die Google-Falle: Die Unkontrollierte Weltmacht Im Internet (Uberreuter, 2008).

After presenting the audience with the latest statistics on Google’s workforce and its German/Austrian market share, Reischl went on to list the main arguments defended in Die Google-Falle. Reischl feels Google can hardly be called a search engine any longer but is, in fact, a dangerous corporation with ambitions to control the internet and discard our privacy. Its market position and ever expanding services are dangerous to an information society.

A long string of patents is indicative of both Google’s historic and future incentives. The PageRank algorithm is celebrating its 10 year anniversary, while new patents, such as the Programmable Search Engine, are being claimed.

A recent debate on Google Analytics has inspired German news weekly Der Spiegel to delete the software from Spiegel Online. With 80 % of the websites today running Google Analytics, it is completely unclear which party collects what kind of information about your presence on the web. Reischl illustrated such during his presentation, by running a search for Spiegel Online on http://www.ontraxx.net, a service that detects Google Analytics on any given website. While Der Spiegel had indeed deleted the software from its server, the ontraxx program showed that Google Analytics continued to run, through third parties such as dating sites that advertise on Spiegel Online.

Google’s investment in DNA search project 23andMe is another of Reischl’s worries. Obviously, health care is hardly core search engine business. The website asks you to send your saliva to the United States, after which it will make your complete DNA profile available online. All this can be done as we speak, for about 300 USD, within a time span of four to six weeks. The dangerous part, Reischl argues, is the way Google makes DNA testing seem ‘normal’. Soon enough, companies will want to check a person’s DNA profile prior to employment, or a DNA button will appear on MySpace profiles.

Reischl predicts that Google will not remain everybody’s darling for long. Recent discussions about Chrome might be indicative of a more critical trend among users, and proper education should help to further raise awareness.

Joris van Hoboken - Search Engines and Digital Civil Rights

Joris van Hoboken is a full-time PhD candidate at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam. He has a background in the Dutch digital civil rights movement Bits of Freedom, which is part of European Digital Rights (EDRI) and is currently a visiting researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Van Hoboken’s talk focused on the legal framework search engines have to act within. First off, he indicated to be somewhat more positive about Google’s attempts to acknowledge digital civil rights than was Gerald Reischl. Instead of focusing on Google’s power, it is important to review alternatives to the existing policies.

Van Hoboken firstly addressed the various kinds of pressure exerted on entities mediating Internet access, such as ISPs and search engines. In France, the three-strikes-out strategy makes the ISP the new gatekeeper. In trying to put a stop to the violation of intellectual property rights through file sharing, the government might seriously harm the freedom of expression. Similar examples where ISPs decide what Internet we get to see can be found in the US where Verizon widely blocked Usenet access this summer, instead of blocking just the few offending groups.

Search is a focal point in content regulation as well. Pressure is exerted on search providers by institutions like the EU, often resulting in the removal of search results and takedown requests. In the case of national government ordering, this filtering results in a geographical suppression of information, while keeping it findable outside of national limits. Self-regulated filtering by search engines takes place as well. Google.de, for instance, has been noted to filter certain right wing extremist content of its own accord completely.

In protecting the freedom of expression, Van Hoboken sees a role for politics. Democratic involvement is necessary, and debates should be taking place at this level. As freedom of expression often seems to be a ‘negative’ right, perceptions on the role of governments vary widely.

Van Hoboken then talked about the current regulatory involvement with search engines in the EU. It is hard to decide when exactly a search engine becomes liable for showing a link to illegal material, or when an ISP can be charged for enabling file sharing. Laws on so-called intermediary liability have been effective on the EU level since 2000. In these laws however, ISPs enjoy some sort of safe haven in order to be able to function at all. Search engines are not excluded from intermediary liability laws, giving cause for possible chilling effects concerning freedom of expression.

The European Commission recently issued a Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy, which implicitly states that search engines might in future need prior permission to index a site, instead of the opt-out robot.txt-model that is currently applied. Obviously, publishers should have some means of control, but Van Hoboken feels this scenario could change the search engine landscape extremely.

Concluding his argument, Van Hoboken states that search engines are a primary target of information suppression. We should ask ourselves whether this is the road we want to take. Legal policy discussions affect the access to information, which is why they should be followed closely. And finally, the way in which the government might positively influence freedom of expression and the access to information in future should not be left unexplored.

part 2

The e-art exhibition itself featured Govcom’s project elFriendo, interestingly subtitled ‘Taking the Work out of Social Networking’ and a welcome wink to the many social networking themes of the conference. The tool allows for the automated creation of full-blown MySpace profiles by merely naming three of your interests. Mining the existing resource of social network profiles further enables elFriendo to compare your interests with a wannabe-friend, or fix a complete profile make-over that will fit you in with a new crowd in no time.

Switching from the politics of social networking to the politics of the Google Interface, another approach was taken in the Google Politics of Tabs-video, of which a preview is a offered below. Rogers explained that by making use of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as a website research tool, Govcom.org has been able to visualize the ‘demise of the directory’ in the Google interface since the year 2000. In a way consistent with the current dominance of searching over browsing/’surfing’, the demise of the ‘web librarian’ indicates a change in both user behavior and search engine policy.

See what Govcom.org writes on the research of natively digital objects, or watch the original on crookedline.nl.

Approaching search from a user perspective, Halavais notes that the diversity of searching skills represents yet another level of the digital divide as even the most basic search is a complicated action. Where students tend to ‘shop’ sites such as Wikipedia or IMDB before turning to the search engine, experienced users engage in a more ‘focused browsing’; carefully circling concepts while extracting, recording and recombining data until results are met. Reaching those parts of the web that aren’t easily indexed however, requires yet alternative strategies.

Search based on re-finding information have become a recent interest to researchers. Making use of the remembering web, for instance through bookmarking sites such as delicious, re-finding may become a profitable search strategy. Much the same goes for real-time search, the process of re-using those searches that have proved to work in the past. In this line of ‘query-free search’, an engine may provide ways to find conceptual similarities to previously found pages or documents. As users gain experience, searching tends to become more complex. Most general-purpose search engines seem ill equipped to meet this diversity of needs, often building on traditional methods. Another pressing problem in determining a search strategy is the engine’s constant updating of ranking algorithms, causing a state of flux that is all but transparent.

Turning to the attention economy, Halavais addresses the way attention is distributed differently on the web as opposed to earlier information environments. Hyperlink analysis has long shown that the web is anything but a level environment and is, infrastructurally, quite unsupportive of the diversity of the content it holds. These changes however, present a host of possibilities for the advertisement industry, leading most technological developments in the field of attention aggregation. Google has gained advantage over other search engines by recognizing the way hyperlinks may serve as ‘votes’ rather than mere connections. The assumption that all links are votes, and equal ones at that, has set the basis for its reputation-based PageRank algorithm. Although the relationship between search and advertisement may seem strained, Halavais notes that Google has made to benefit from ties between the two.

As search technology creates winners and losers, traditional authorities (people, institutions, ideas) tend to be reinforced. In the chapter ‘Knowledge and Democracy’, Halavais discusses the existing tension between the diversity of web content and the unifying force of the search engine. Search inequality exists on many levels. While experienced users will be less influenced by a search engine’s bias towards a global consumer culture, the existing hegemony is expected to divert cultural diversity as more cultural content moves online.

US domination of the search market and a tendency towards English resources, has been cause for Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the French National Library, to make a pressing case for search engines created and managed in Europe. The ‘Googlization’ of cultural artifacts furthermore reduces the ability of governments to protect less popular resources, and as such protect diversity. PageRank-wise, more links lead to US pages, firstly since they have often existed longer, and secondly since early winners keep their advantage - a mechanism multiplied by search engine workings. Halavais argues for designers of information structures to consider the cultural bases that help people gain a better understanding of search.

Google’s many ways of modeling the access to information are a constant source for criticism. Halavais defines the core search engine question in this respect as: “Who sees what, under which circumstances and in what context? “ From an early stage on, national borders have been enforced online, and search engines serve as an important scene of control and surveillance across the globe. It is the area of search engine policy where the commercial distribution of content and the access to balanced information collide. Aside from company algorithms and national government policies, another policy that effectively shapes (large) search engine rankings is the enforcement of intellectual property rights by new copyright laws. Much of the problem, according to Halavais, can be attributed to a lack of policy transparency, creating a fertile ground for misuse and mistrust. As is the case with governments, informed citizenry and open discourse is a crucial ingredient of effectiveness. As centralizing tendencies usually get reinforced over time, it seems fair to expect nothing less from the search engine industry.

Much has been written on the subject of online identity construction. The role of the search engine in this process seems less touched upon. Halavais suggests the engine plays a part in influencing the building blocks, by determining what we encounter online. Search engines facilitate the building of profiles of people we interact with, through social networking sites, picture search and the like. Privacy issues form the obvious downside of identity building, for instance; how much do our queries reveal about ourselves? Halavais answers by quoting John Batelle, who characterizes Google as “database of intents” (2005); a valuable archive of desires. Google uses its search history database for profiling, personalizing search and targeting ads. It doesn’t stop there, as Google Ads and Google Analytics (thanks to newly acquired DoubleClick) facilitate the tracking of users across the web. As services expand, massive amounts of personal information are collected, fueling the need to scrutinize search engine policy.

The shifting of attention and identity through contexts has inspired the ‘gesellschaft’ model of online communities; sharing the same goals but intersecting very little. As Halavais suggests, a combination of social media and search engines, being integrating technologies, may draw together currently distinct pieces of our lives. When looking at services such as PayPal and Amazon, a similar trend is notable that emphasizes the ‘real’ individual behind online identities. Trust, in fact, seems only possible when an offline identity supports our digital actions. At the moment, the best we can do to defend our privacy is create alternate identities, pseudonyms etcetera. With the increase of surveillance technology however, the very same techniques could be put to use to diminish secrecy on various levels. Watching each other and watching the watcher – either from below (sousveillance) or from beside, turning the engine into an ‘ethical member of society’. Handled in the right way, a sustained open society may even reduce the need for government control.

As search seems social by default, Alex Halavais uses the term sociable search to indicate a more friendly form of interaction aimed at connecting people and locating expertise. In the sociable future of search, he feels, emphasis will be placed on social networks and information sharing. In looking for ways to exploit this social power, he examines both the process of collaborative filtering and the relationship of experts to expertise. Collaborative filtering, as found on sites like digg, StumbleUpon and delicious, facilitates people with similar interests to effortlessly discover relevant online material. The ‘implicit cultures’ that appear, allow individuals to find what they didn’t know they were looking for, including a host of material that the search engine leaves behind. In this respect collaborative filtering could be seen as an alternative to the search engine, as well as an opportunity to improve search. Most likely, collaborative filtering will be taken up into a larger ecology of fundability. Where sociable browsing is common already, sociable search would use social connections to improve traditional search processes.

Human expertise is slowly reintroduced into the search process. Obviously, Google’s PageRank algorithm is based on implicit social judgments, and a traditional relationship exists between hyperlinks and social networks. Wikia search introduced an alternative navigational paradigm in 2007, introducing transparent algorithms and the possibility for other engines to build on its technology. Halavais feels that more alternative search engines will appear that combine traditional indexing with human coded content. Another promising trend is made up by meta search engines, leaving the crawling to others but allowing for people to explicitly vote on search results, and as such reorder the rankings. Attracting knowledge work and investing in human cognition will be an important factor of success.

Searching our social networks for expertise makes us reach search goals more quickly. Search engines have notorious difficulties in finding the deep web, of which Halaviais argues that the deepest part is the wet web, the unindexed information inside of people’s heads. A complete search does not only include images, documents, text and video, but also people. Some sites have realized this by establishing a market for asking questions, such as ask.com and LinkedIn. The subsequent rating of answer helps one filter for the most credible results, backed by an often available background of the answerer. In a way, this commodification of intellectual labor is consistent with a time in which people offer knowledge work to the community freely in projects such as Wikipedia.

Changes are notable in the way society creates, shares and evaluates knowledge. An interesting question Halavais poses in this respect, is: In what way is ‘truth’ determined by findability and the endorsement of peers?  We are moving away from goal-oriented search towards a desire to build connections between people. Aside from an economy of attention, there exist the economies of reputation; trust networks and the building of social capital. Sociable search should be seen as an information economy, inviting ideas about process. Those search engines that fail to become sociable, will eventually fail to serve our needs.

Currently, the ‘keep it simple’ strategy still rules the search engine industry. Halavais sees an equal amount of work to be done in extracting meaning and relations, as in finding ways to present and act upon data. Personalized search should be followed by personalized displays of content. A future semantic web always seems right around the corner. While a constrained vocabulary could be useful, the tags and descriptions applied ‘oldfashionedly’ until now however, give a good indication of content and are reasonably well searchable. More structural approaches are likely to evolve, but in a truly sociable web, the social approaches will dominate. Open source initiatives already attempt to create transparent search engines. Projects involving the contribution of home computers in the web crawling process, invite a seducing image of millions of search engines running at once, all sharing data among peers.

The question as to which technology will kill the Google hegemony remains. Most likely, Google will long continue to dominate the general-purpose search engine market. The real potential, Halavais argues, resides in projects exploiting vertical search, where domination of a small engine would not be unthinkable. In the end, investigating power relations in the information society involves investigating the search engine market, where knowledge is the only real bankable commodity.

Building on the idea that a search engine might best be developed within the context of the specific content that is offered, there have been several developments on the query side as well. OpenSearch, developed by Amazon sponsored A9, has become the standard format for search engine description documents since Firefox 2 and IE 7. The description documents tell the browser how to ‘call upon’ a search engine, defining the properties of the search box and engine on your site, such as the database it should use when suggesting search terms to your users. Any website with a search option can offer its results in the OpenSearch format, allowing for the syndication of results with those of other sites, by aggregators or meta-search engines.

One of the latest search-related initiatives is Briteclick, a start-up company that presented its tool (not an engine) at the TechCrunch50 conference just yesterday. Its main feature is the way it allows for sidebar information to become available in just one click on a keyword (hence ‘briteclicking’), without having to leave the page you are on. For instance, when using mail, one could highlight and right-click the word ‘Merlot’, choose ‘Briteclick’, and the sidebar will display a module allowing one to search a large wine database. Briteclick is set up as a free and easy to install platform that lets vertical search engines create a Briteclick module that will be displayed in the sidebar during a relevant search. With this tool, Briteclick claims to have developed an application that “simplifies the way people search and complete tasks on the web”. Unfortunately, Briteclick is not publicly available as of yet, beta testing is possible by invitation only.

I took part in the Studying Software group (lead by Warren Sack) where we narrowed our focus to a device-centric study of news aggregators and alternative editorial processes. We worked towards defining a system that determined the geographic location of news sources surrounding a specific issue on Google News. Our aim was to explore whether geographical distance distinguishes significant differences of opinion. For instance, when discussing the issue of the Iraq War, is there a significant difference between French opinions and American opinions? Or, given the issue of “whaling” does the Northern Hemisphere (e.g., Norway, Japan) have a significantly different way of describing the issue than does the Southern Hemisphere?

The protocol we presented at the end of the week describes a process where the input is a query (of one or more search terms in Google News) and the output is a set of colored, geographical maps. The maps show the geographical locations where one query term, for instance “North Korea”, co-occurs with a certain secondary keyword, such as “reunification”, “human rights” or “nuclear”. For instance, if the query is “North Korea” the process might determine that “North Korea” frequently co-occurs with the noun “reunification” in the news sources of North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and China; co-occurs infrequently in Brazil; and, co-occurs not at all in the rest of the world. Then, the colored map might show most of Asia tinted orange with 100% opacity; Brazil tinted orange with 20% opacity; and the rest of the world left blank. The actual scripting and testing of the proposed tool may lead to further refinements and related uses, such as the possibility to zoom in on the world map in order to get to the local sources, or to follow the development of an issue over a period of time.

Other research projects and tools realized during the Jubilee Workshop:

Nomadic Citizenship: Palestinian Cyberland goes Web 2.0
IP Browser
The Vigilance of Wikipedians