Invisible Search and Online Search Engines

The Ubiquity of Search in Everyday Life

Jutta Haider, Olof Sundin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429828010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Invisible Search and Online Search Engines considers the use of search engines in contemporary everyday life and the challenges this poses for media and information literacy. Looking for mediated information is mostly done online and arbitrated by the various tools and devices that people carry with them on a daily basis. Because of this, search engines have a significant impact on the structure of our lives, and personal and public memories. Haider and Sundin consider what this means for society, whilst also uniting research on information retrieval with research on how people actually look for and encounter information.

Search engines are now one of society's key infrastructures for knowing and becoming informed. While their use is dispersed across myriads of social practices, where they have acquired close to naturalised positions, they are commercially and technically centralised. Arguing that search, searching, and search engines have become so widely used that we have stopped noticing them, Haider and Sundin consider what it means to be so reliant on this all-encompassing and increasingly invisible information infrastructure.

Invisible Search and Online Search Engines is the first book to approach search and search engines from a perspective that combines insights from the technical expertise of information science research with a social science and humanities approach. As such, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students working on and studying information science, library and information science (LIS), media studies, journalism, digital cultures, and educational sciences.

1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780429448546-1

This is a book about search. It is concerned with how search, searching, and with them search engines have become so widely used that we have stopped noticing them. It is thus more accurately a book about invisible search. One of society’s key infrastructures for knowing and becoming informed is computerised systems supporting the search for and locating of documents and information. The use of these systems, search engines, is curiously dispersed and centralised at the same time. It is dispersed across a vast array of social practices in which it has acquired close to naturalised positions (Hillis et al. 2013), while it is commercially and technically centralised and controlled by a handful of very dominant companies, especially one extremely powerful global player, Google. In the course of this, we can call it double movement, search has all but vanished from sight. Invisibility is often highlighted as one of the key features of an infrastructure (Star 1999) and clearly, in this sense it is safe to say that search engines are a fundamental information infrastructure. Yet, what does that mean more specifically? How do people deal with search engines? How do we research their use and which strands of previous research help us understand this all-encompassing, increasingly invisible information infrastructure?

With digital tools now permeating most aspects of society, the use of search engines has become integral to everyday life on many levels. Searching for recipes or the bus timetable, for medical advice, for old neighbourhood photos or the weather report, searching for work-related documents, legal guidance or for the whereabouts of former colleagues, all this is done instantaneously on the same interface and using the same devices, thus inscribing itself into various parts of life. Search permeates myriads of social practices and everyday life at all levels, but it often remains invisible. It appears to be simple and is done effortlessly. Yet, this effortless simplicity with which online search intersects with everyday life in so many different situations conceals an astounding complexity. Accordingly, various strands of research traditions have for a long time been dealing with different aspects of search and search engines. In fact, an entire set of considerations comes to the fore relating to issues such as the ways in which social practices are integrated with technology, with understanding what information might be and do in a certain situation, how to make sense of it in a specific context in relation to search technology, or in which ways to trust or question it. Furthermore, being searchable is today not only often seen as a feature of information, but information is also moulded to fit the shape provided by the tools used for searching for it, and, more often than not, this is a web search engine (Gillespie 2017; Haider 2014; Kallinikos et al. 2010). Inversely, this also means that information that is not produced in conformity with the rules laid down by dominant search engines gets buried and is made less visible (Mulligan & Griffin 2018, pp. 569–570). Ultimately this – we can call it search-ification – of everyday life relates to the ways in which an increasingly invisible information infrastructure is entangled across culture and its practices and to what means we have at our disposal for understanding and making sense of these entanglements (see also Sundin et al. 2017).

To look for, find, or retrieve information has always been one of the central concerns of libraries, as for information science, and at least since the 1940s and 1950s information science has been concerned with search in computerised systems more specifically. In a narrow sense and when the focus is on technical systems, the field is called information retrieval. In a broader sense and with a focus on people, it is often referred to as information behaviour. More colloquially, talk is of (online) searching or searching for information. Accordingly, these days society’s most important information retrieval systems are simply called search engines. Looking for mediated information is mostly done online and arbitrated by the various tools and devices that people carry with them on a daily basis. In addition, various algorithms and not least economic interests organise search. This way, search engines contribute to structuring private as much as professional lives and public and personal memories in ways that might not be immediately obvious.

This search-ification of everyday life is also connected to the fact that contemporary general-purpose web search engines are by most measures easy to use and return in most cases results that are experienced as useful. What used to be complicated-to-use information retrieval systems, integrated with expensive (for users) databases designed for specific professional groups and frequently queried by information professionals or librarians, have for many turned into an unassuming query box or are integrated into a mobile phone by voice recognition via virtual personal assistants. Full-text searches across an enormous and ever-growing index are carried out at a speed that makes them appear to be almost instantaneous. Neither professional education, knowledge of query languages, nor controlled vocabularies are needed to query a general-purpose web search engine and to do so in a way that is adequate for most purposes. No subscriptions are required to use them. In fact, they are increasingly seen to replace specialised retrieval systems or these have begun to emulate general-purpose search engines in order to appear user-friendly. As using search engines and doing so proficiently became feasible for the general public, searching became not only inserted into all kinds of social practices, but was also de-professionalised. We propose to call this the mundane-ification of search (Sundin et al. 2017).

Using search engines is now just another ordinary activity, hard to discern and increasingly difficult to study and also teach. This is not least due to the way that the technical workings of the system have become increasingly opaque to users the simpler to use a search engine appears. This is amplified by the fact that control over this crucial information infrastructure is in the hands of commercial organisations whose business model is based on their having full control over their index (database), their algorithms and their user data and whose “core unit of exchange” is traffic (van Couvering 2008, p. 177).

Everyday life and social practices

This book is framed around the notion of everyday life. A focus on everyday life is quite common in order to subsume all kinds of practices, behaviours, and periods that are not related either to education or the workplace. Obviously, this can pertain to extremely different situations and thus play out differently when related to search. Everyday life is a fundamentally temporal notion (Adam 1995). Its emergence and meaning is closely connected to industrialisation and to the structuring of production in capitalist society and in particular of the welfare state (Nowotny 1994). Everything is tightly structured, negotiated, and controlled by the rules of the market and of work, in terms of holidays, protected working time per week or day, shifts, overlay time, weekends, and so on. The advent of the notion of everyday life is also part of a shift from a focus on production to one on consumption, which makes possible and also requires non-working time conceptualised as leisure time or quality time and importantly also as time for consumption. Only when we think of time as something that can be subject to commodification, which it is in capitalist society, does the concept of everyday life make sense. “Everyday life has become the bracket combining work and so-called free time; the private ‘spending of time’ and the public spending form a new combination in everyday life”, writes Helga Nowotny (1994, p. 103) and she continues: “The great public institutions of the state and the economy, and their temporal perspectives, are confronted with the temporal perspectives of the citizens and employees, the economic subjects”. In information science, time is an under-theorised notion and Reijo Savolainen called already in 2006 (p. 124) for the “need to develop a research agenda in order to approach the temporal issues of information seeking more systematically”. Search engines are one of today’s most important information and communication technologies and clearly their enormous presence has implications not only for how we think of time but also for how we think, experience, and practice time.

Talking of different temporal perspectives that meet and collide, opens up for an understanding of everyday life that is more attuned to the intermingling of different structures of control, of various allegiances and demands than to a predominantly chronological notion, where one period follows after the other. Rather, the illusive concept of everyday life can be understood as something that is part of all life in different ways and not necessarily clearly distinguished from that which is “not everyday life”. We can think of it as reaching into situations and periods of, for instance, work or education or participation in civic life. Helga Nowotny (1994) talks of the increasing blurring of the boundaries between public and private time in the phenomenon of everyday life. Interestingly for our investigation, she also identifies a related change in human perceptions of time that she discusses in relation to the ubiquity and dominance of communication technology in contemporary society. While work is sometimes conceptually distinct from everyday life as its negative and defining anti-thesis, it is also part of people’s everyday life in a more common-sense understanding. Interestingly, for many, today it is precisely the use of ICTs and general-purpose search engines that in part ties work and non-work together (see also Rosa 2015). This could be considered in terms of a context collapse, where the same tool is used in different situations, e.g. work and private life or family and friends, thus intermingling not just expectations and ways of doing things, but also time scales and temporal perspectives.

Everyday life also denotes the normal, that which is not exceptional. In this sense, everyday life is connected to habits, to repetition, all deeply temporal notions. Our account of online search in everyday life foregrounds precisely this perception of online search as the usual, the normal, as an activity that has established itself as a central part of various routine practices, that is, as one of the taken-for-granted elements making up the practice in question. Social practices are generally theorised in terms of arrangements of activities that connect in specific ways and which in these specific arrangements are observable across groups, that is, they are neither individual nor exceptional. Considerable attention, empirical and conceptual, has been paid to the intricate relationships between information and social practices. We will return to some of this work in Chapter Two. However, less attention has been given to the way in which information technology is implicated in re-arranging practices and what this means for how we engage with and organise everyday life. Chuck Moran (2015, p. 299), drawing on the foundational work of Barbara Adams (e.g. 1995), maintains “[s]ocial practices, particularly those with significant technological components, are organizing temporality in exciting ways”. And he continues: “The passing of time is becoming less important than the accrual of possible events or of sequences that can be activated whenever. Indeed, these practices challenge the very meaning of temporal terms such as memory, event, and even the contemporary”. They also challenge us to rethink our understanding of routines in social practices and of how and when they are constituted. Hartmut Rosa (2015, p. 235) draws our attention to what he calls a “paradigm shift” regarding everyday time strategies and practices. He sees the classic modern everyday routine conceptually superseded by a “temporalized everyday time of late modernity”; the first one dominated by schedules and predefined time, the latter by flexibility and deadlines. Specifically mobile technology, Rosa convincingly develops, and its potential to support the negotiation of flexibility in everyday life is implicated in propelling such a late modern time regime, where “[t]ime orderings are /…/ individually and flexibly created within time itself” (Rosa 2015, p. 235). However subtle, search engines constitute a considerable technological component, to draw on Moran’s expression, in an ever-increasing number of social practices and their ubiquity and dominance are irrevocably tied to mobile technology. Relatedly, the role of mediated information in everyday life is being reorganised on just about every level possible and the way in which search engines are implicated in this is what is at issue in this book.

Between systems and users, search engines and search

Web search engines are formed by their use. They are not static systems that always perform in exactly the same way; rather, they are supposed to adapt to different users’ needs or expectations and also as they are being used to train and improve themselves constantly. This happens on two – closely interlinked – levels, an individual level and a collective level. On the one hand, web search engines are personalised systems. They adapt search results to individual users, or actually more precisely to their user profiles. Mostly this is done in order to increase the chances of returning search results that are perceived as being relevant and useful by the person searching and ultimately this helps to improve the placing of adverts. Increasingly and tied to the growing importance of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), search engines, and specifically Google, have started to develop into “suggest engines”, where active searching is not even necessary as the system is supposed to anticipate what a user wants or needs without a search having to be carried out, at least not in the sense of a person entering a query.

On the other hand, at a collective level, the aggregated queries and user logs are used to improve the system, also with the help of machine learning. Knowing common spelling mistakes, understanding which terms are often or rarely entered together, or which links are followed helps making reasonable assumptions about what others also might want to find (or be suggested). This is also shown to the users in the form of suggestions for further, related searches or through the autocomplete function, where search terms are completed as they are being typed. While this clearly has the effect of helping to formulate relevant searches and thus supports the users, there is also another side to it. Displaying common searches further re-enforces their very dominance, thus contributing to further bolstering their significance and cultural meaning. It is a kind of Matthew Effect, where the rich become richer or, in our case, the known becomes more known. In certain cases, this way – given the trust vested in search engines as neutral brokers of facts – truth and factuality can be established. As Helga Nowotny poignantly (2015, p. 58) notes, “[w]hen Google sought to gauge what people were thinking, it be...