Posting “I am not responsible for making Google better” has taught me a lot about how people perceive Google – while the appearance of sites like FuckedGoogle and ‘Gevil’ indicate a shift in some people’s perceptions, I think Jason Kottke represents many, many others when he writes that
I tend to think I need Google to be as good a search engine as it can be and if I can help in some small way, I’m going to. [...] As Greg said, the Web is still largely what we make of it, so why not make it a good Web?
For Jason, Google is the online equivalent of a good neighbour, and therefore Google deserves some help. Others have written to me and said that Google’s always put their users first – indeed, the very first point in Google’s ten-point ‘philosophy‘ reads “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”
I don’t want to be the grouse-about-Google guy – originally I was going to call this entry ‘Making any one company better will not make the Internet better’, because what I’m saying can be generalized – but Google, like most companies, isn’t perfect. They’ve got a good track record – I use their maps and their mail service and (usually) their search engine – but they’ve definitely made some decisions that have not been all sunshine and light. For instance, they’ve
- cooperated with the censors of totalitarian dictatorships
- blacklisted journalists
- fired employees for blogging pretty innocuous information
- maintained a ‘black box of secrecy‘ around AdSense revenue share (conveniently lifted for the big players)
- continued to expand the amount of advertising alongside their search results
- replaced their text ads with more intrusive advertising formats
They’re no Claria, and I could certainly make a similar list about any company with Google’s revenue, but I’d like to put the shining city on a hill theory to bed for a bit and treat them like any other Internet company. I’d like to consider what trying to prop up Google’s search index quality (or any one company’s anything) through any sort of deliberate human action does. In my opinion:
- It stifles innovation. Trying to adapt human behaviour to a company’s algorithm or process says ‘hey, no need to improve the algorithm, why don’t you go off and do a hundred other things’ to the company – where in reality any algorithm or process that can’t account for actual human behavior in all its imperfections is at best imperfect and usually broke. We understand this about UI now – instead of forcing users to conform to the UI, we craft the UI to conform to the natural behavior of users. Why should algorithms or processes be different?
- It causes us to get prescriptive and limit our behaviour, which really doesn’t work. Take e-mail spam – I’ve never spammed anybody, but I got so sick of people telling me not to spam anybody – along with other assorted bits of ‘netiquette’. Not only was it annoying, it wasn’t all that effective, because I (and everybody else) still got a ton of spam. People have gotten smarter about this over the last half-decade. Instead of trying to solve problems through social manipulation, they’re doing so increasing doing so through technical means. But when new problems emerge, we still try to shape behaviour through castigation and campaigning, instead of creating a transparent technical solution.
- It acts a barrier to entry for new and possibly better solutions. As we grow more and more invested in any one company – both psychologically and through data lock-in – it becomes all that more difficult for others to introduce something better. By insisting that we all get together to back and support ‘our’ search engines (or VOIP companies, or favorite blogs, or what-have-you), we’ll end up with the technical equivalent of America’s two-party political system. The consequences, psychological and practical, of switching to a new option will simply become too high – and therefore we’ll no more do it than we’ll vote Green or Libertarian.
None of the above are particularly good for ‘the Web’. What is? Going about your business – including trying to make money, including trying to degrade the common good for personal gain. By doing so, you’ll be the social equivalent of a hacker publishing a security hole – you might cause short-term damage, but you’ll reveal a problem and drive others to find a solution. We’ve been cutting Google and the other search engine companies too much slack by throwing up ‘no follow’ links, manually reporting spam blogs, submitting sitemaps, conducting public shaming marathons against people just making a buck off advertising – in other words, adapting our behavior to help them. It’s time to say “hey, if you’re really focused on doing one thing really, really well, why don’t you repurpose some of the developers working on tangential projects and do it?” The open-source proposal from Doc Searls might be an even better idea – not that I think the big search companies will go for it. There are technical solutions out there that’ll allow us to behave like real human beings – sometimes considerate, sometimes assholes. But until we stop adapting to prop up busted systems, we’re not going to get there.
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