The Shallows (19 page)

Google’s innovations have paid off for its founders and investors. But the biggest beneficiaries have been Web users. Google has succeeded in making the Internet a far more efficient informational medium. Earlier search engines tended to get clogged with data as the Web expanded—they couldn’t index the new content, much less separate the wheat from the chaff. Google’s engine, by contrast, has been engineered to produce better results as the Web grows. The more sites and links Google evaluates, the more precisely it can classify pages and rank their quality. And as traffic increases, Google is able to collect more behavioral data, allowing it to tailor its search results and advertisements ever more precisely to users’ needs and desires. The company has also invested many billions of dollars in building computer-packed data centers around the world, ensuring that it can deliver search results to its users in milliseconds. Google’s popularity and profitability are well deserved. The company plays an invaluable role in helping people navigate the hundreds of billions of pages that now populate the Web. Without its search engine, and the other engines that have been built on its model, the Internet would have long ago become a Tower of Digital Babel.

But Google, as the supplier of the Web’s principal navigational tools, also shapes our relationship with the content that it serves up so efficiently and in such profusion. The intellectual technologies it has pioneered promote the speedy, superficial skimming of information and discourage any deep, prolonged engagement with a single argument, idea, or narrative. “Our goal,” says Irene Au, “is to get users in and out really quickly. All our design decisions are based on that strategy.”
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Google’s profits are tied directly to the velocity of people’s information intake. The faster we surf across the surface of the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google gains to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Its advertising system, moreover, is explicitly designed to figure out which messages are most likely to grab our attention and then to place those messages in our field of view. Every click we make on the Web marks a break in our concentration, a bottom-up disruption of our attention—and it’s in Google’s economic interest to make sure we click as often as possible. The last thing the company wants is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. Google is, quite literally, in the business of distraction.

GOOGLE MAY YET
turn out to be a flash in the pan. The lives of Internet companies are rarely nasty or brutish, but they do tend to be short. Because their businesses are ethereal, constructed of invisible strands of software code, their defenses are fragile. All it takes to render a thriving online business obsolete is a sharp programmer with a fresh idea. The invention of a more precise search engine or a better way to circulate ads through the Net could spell ruin for Google. But no matter how long the company is able to maintain its dominance over the flow of digital information, its intellectual ethic will remain the general ethic of the Internet as a medium. Web publishers and toolmakers will continue to attract traffic and make money by encouraging and feeding our hunger for small, rapidly dispensed pieces of information.

The history of the Web suggests that the velocity of data will only increase. During the 1990s, most online information was found on so-called static pages. They didn’t look all that different from the pages in magazines, and their content remained relatively fixed. The trend since then has been to make pages ever more “dynamic,” updating them regularly and often automatically with new content. Specialized blogging software, introduced in 1999, made rapid-fire publishing simple for everyone, and the most successful bloggers soon found that they needed to post many items a day to keep fickle readers engaged. News sites followed suit, serving up fresh stories around the clock. RSS readers, which became popular around 2005, allowed sites to “push” headlines and other bits of information to Web users, putting an even greater premium on the frequency of information delivery.

The greatest acceleration has come recently, with the rise of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. These companies are dedicated to providing their millions of members with a never-ending “stream” of “real-time updates,” brief messages about, as a Twitter slogan puts it, “what’s happening
right now
.” By turning intimate messages—once the realm of the letter, the phone call, the whisper—into fodder for a new form of mass media, the social networks have given people a compelling new way to socialize and stay in touch. They’ve also placed a whole new emphasis on immediacy. A “status update” from a friend, co-worker, or favorite celebrity loses its currency within moments of being issued. To be up to date requires the continual monitoring of message alerts. The competition among the social networks to deliver ever-fresher and more plentiful messages is fierce. When, in early 2009, Facebook responded to Twitter’s rapid growth by announcing that it was revamping its site to, as it put it, “increase the pace of the stream,” its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, assured its quarter of a billion members that the company would “continue making the flow of information even faster.”
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Unlike early book printers, who had strong economic incentives to promote the reading of older works as well as recent ones, online publishers battle to distribute the newest of the new.

Google hasn’t been sitting still. To combat the upstarts, it has been revamping its search engine to ratchet up its speed. The quality of a page, as determined by the links coming into it, is no longer Google’s chief criterion in ranking search results. In fact, it’s now only one of two hundred different “signals” that the company monitors and measures, according to Amit Singhal, a top Google engineer.
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One of its major recent thrusts has been to place a greater priority on what it calls the “freshness” of the pages it recommends. Google not only identifies new or revised Web pages much more quickly than it used to—it now checks the most popular sites for updates every few seconds rather than every few days—but for many searches it skews its results to favor newer pages over older ones. In May 2009, the company introduced a new twist to its search service, allowing users to bypass considerations of quality entirely and have results ranked according to how recently the information was posted to the Web. A few months later, it announced a “next-generation architecture” for its search engine that bore the telling code name Caffeine.
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Citing Twitter’s achievements in speeding the flow of data, Larry Page said that Google wouldn’t be satisfied until it is able “to index the Web every second to allow real-time search.”
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The company is also striving to further expand its hold on Web users and their data. With the billions in profits churned out by AdWords, it has been able to diversify well beyond its original focus on searching Web pages. It now has specialized search services for, among other things, images, videos, news stories, maps, blogs, and academic journals, all of which feed into the results supplied by its main search engine. It also offers computer operating systems, such as Android for smartphones and Chrome for PCs, as well as a slew of online software programs, or “apps,” including e-mail, word processing, blogging, photo storage, feed reading, spreadsheets, calendars, and Web hosting. Google Wave, an ambitious social-networking service launched at the end of 2009, allows people to monitor and update various multimedia message threads on a single densely packed page, which refreshes its contents automatically and almost instantaneously. Wave, says one reporter, “turns conversations into fast-moving group streams-of-consciousness.”
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The company’s seemingly boundless expansiveness has been a matter of much discussion, particularly among management scholars and business reporters. The breadth of its influence and activity is often interpreted as evidence that it is an entirely new species of business, one that transcends and redefines all traditional categories. But while Google is an unusual company in many ways, its business strategy is not quite as mysterious as it seems. Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its main business: selling and distributing online ads. Rather, it stems from the vast number of “complements” to that business. Complements are, in economic terms, any products or services that tend be purchased or consumed together, such as hot dogs and mustard or lamps and lightbulbs. For Google, everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. As people spend more time and do more things online, they see more ads and they disclose more information about themselves—and Google rakes in more money. As additional products and services have come to be delivered digitally over computer networks—entertainment, news, software applications, financial transactions, phone calls—Google’s range of complements has extended into ever more industries.

Because the sales of complementary products rise in tandem, a company has a strong strategic interest in reducing the cost and expanding the availability of the complements to its main product. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that a company would like all complements to be given away. If hot dogs were free, mustard sales would skyrocket. It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than anything else, explains Google’s business strategy. Nearly everything the company does is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants information to be free because, as the cost of information falls, we all spend more time looking at computer screens and the company’s profits go up.

Most of Google’s services are not profitable in themselves. Industry analysts estimate, for example, that YouTube, which Google bought for $1.65 billion in 2006, lost between $200 million and $500 million in 2009.
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But because popular services like YouTube enable Google to collect more information, to funnel more users toward its search engine, and to prevent would-be competitors from gaining footholds in its markets, the company is able to justify the cost of launching them. Google has let it be known that it won’t be satisfied until it stores “100% of user data.”
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Its expansionary zeal isn’t just about money, though. The steady colonization of additional types of content also furthers the company’s mission of making the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.” Its ideals and its business interests converge in one overarching goal: to digitize ever more types of information, move the information onto the Web, feed it into its database, run it through its classification and ranking algorithms, and dispense it in what it calls “snippets” to Web surfers, preferably with ads in tow. With each expansion of Google’s ambit, its Taylorist ethic gains a tighter hold on our intellectual lives.

THE MOST AMBITIOUS
of Google’s initiatives—what Marissa Mayer calls its “moon shot”
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—is its effort to digitize all the books ever printed and make their text “discoverable and searchable online.”
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The program began in secret in 2002, when Larry Page set up a digital scanner in his office in the Googleplex and, to the beat of a metronome, spent a half hour methodically scanning the pages of a three-hundred-page book. He wanted to get a rough sense of how long it would take “to digitally scan every book in the world.” The next year, a Google employee was sent to Phoenix to buy a pile of old books at a charity sale. Once carted back to the Googleplex, the volumes became the test subjects in a series of experiments that led to the development of a new “high-speed” and “non-destructive” scanning technique. The ingenious system, which involves the use of stereoscopic infrared cameras, is able to automatically correct for the bowing of pages that occurs when a book is opened, eliminating any distortion of the text in the scanned image.
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At the same time, a team of Google software engineers was fine-tuning a sophisticated character recognition program able to handle “odd type sizes, unusual fonts or other unexpected peculiarities—in 430 different languages.” Another group of Google employees spread out to visit leading libraries and book publishers to gauge their interest in having Google digitize their books.
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In the fall of 2004, Page and Brin formally announced the Google Print program (it would later be renamed Google Book Search) at the Frankfurt Book Fair, an event that since Gutenberg’s day has been the publishing industry’s chief annual gathering. More than a dozen trade and academic presses signed on as Google’s partners, including such top names as Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, and the university presses of Oxford, Cambridge, and Princeton. Five of the world’s most prestigious libraries, including Harvard’s Widener, Oxford’s Bodleian, and the New York Public Library, also agreed to collaborate in the effort. They granted Google permission to begin scanning the contents of their stacks. By the end of the year, the company already had the text of an estimated hundred thousand books in its data bank.

Not everyone was happy with the library scanning project. Google was not just scanning old books that had fallen out of copyright protection. It was also scanning newer books that, while often out of print, were still the copyrighted property of their authors or publishers. Google made it clear that it had no intention of tracking down and securing the consent of the copyright holders in advance. Rather, it would proceed to scan all the books and include them in its database unless a copyright owner sent it a formal written request to exclude a particular book. On September 20, 2005, the Authors Guild, along with three prominent writers acting individually, sued Google, alleging that the scanning program entailed “massive copyright infringement.”
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A few weeks later, the Association of American Publishers filed another lawsuit against the company, demanding that it stop scanning the libraries’ collections. Google fired back, launching a public relations offensive to publicize the societal benefits of Google Book Search. In October, Eric Schmidt wrote an op-ed column for the
Wall Street Journal
that portrayed the book digitization effort in terms at once stirring and vainglorious: “Imagine the cultural impact of putting tens of millions of previously inaccessible volumes into one vast index, every word of which is searchable by anyone, rich and poor, urban and rural, First World and Third,
en toute langue
—and all, of course, entirely for free.”
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