How neutral and unbiased can the search for information be if a de facto monopolist is conducting it?
That is the question posed today by German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung in an article
In April 2008, a stunning 90% of Internet searches in Germany were conducted through Google. As Sueddeutsche Zeitung points out, “these numbers are reminiscent of the election results of totalitarian regimes.”
With numbers like this, websites that are not found by Google for the vast majority of Germans simply don’t exist. As Sueddeutsche writes, most Germans consequently believe that “the options presented by Google represent the entire world.”
And Google doesn’t just “present options”, of course. It also ranks websites according to their “relevance,” as determined by a mathematical algorithm. In other words, Google (and all other search engines for that matter) suggests to users that it is not simply offering them “information,” but also “meaning.”
Some experts, such as telepolis author Goedart Palm, therefore have warned that Google is no longer a neutral medium for conducting Internet searches, but rather epitomizes a “knowledge regime to which users have to submit in their daily lives.” As Gerald Reischl, author of the book Die Google-Falle [The Google Trap] points out, this is a logical consequence of Google’s progression “from a search engine to a global company that wants to be the world’s biggest trader of information.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like the fact that search engines sort results according to their relevance. It would be pretty annoying, after all, to find the most interesting result at the bottom of page 15 instead of at the top of page 1 (and Google and other search engines mostly do succeed in listing the most interesting results on page 1).
The problem is Google’s huge market share in search in Germany, which gives the company enormous power over what Germans know – and therefore over how they perceive the world which, in turn, influences everything from what they buy to who they vote for in elections.
In the 1960s, Frankfurt School theorist Jürgen Habermas warned of “the refeudalization of the public sphere,” in which the ruling class can exert control over the masses because it can keep from them the knowledge which would allow them to rebel against their masters. The powerlessness of the masses is born of their ignorance.
Nowadays, it is not the landowning ruling class that has a monopoly on knowledge. It is companies such as Google that determine – through algorithms that are kept secret – what people know. There is a certain irony in this since the Internet was originally seen as a medium that would democratize knowledge.
People have the option to turn to newspapers, books and blogs in their quest for knowledge, of course. But with search engines becoming the preferred tool for locating information for an ever greater number of people and Google having a 90% share of the German search engine market, Google does hold significant control over knowledge in Germany.
As the venerable Sir Francis Bacon said, “[k]nowledge is power.” In 2008, this is just as true as in 1597. And I bet Google knows this, too.