Search engines, in their freedom to count any information as “relevant” regardless of truth value or authorial intent, echo Derrida’s discussion of communication in Signature Event Context, in terms of “freeing the performative from the authority of the truth value, from the true/false opposition, at least in its classical form, and [substituting] for it at times the value of force” (Derrida 13). This concept of the performative in the context of Internet search is especially relevant because of its identity in force, rather than its meaning in an author’s intent or its truthfulness. Derrida defines the performative as an utterance which “produces or transforms a situation” and serves as “a ‘communication,’ which is not limited strictly to the transference of a semantic content that is already constituted and dominated by an orientation toward truth” (14). Here, the term “search query” is a “performative,” for any series of terms entered into a search engine with the intent of creating a list of results and possible choices is an utterance that “produces or transforms a situation.” Additionally, that a search query entered into the blank box on Google’s home page could be any combination of words adhering to grammar or not, with regard for “truth” or not, makes it performative in its existence as a “communication” not “limited strictly to the transference of semantic content.”

To return to the idea that a search query is performative with the built-in ability to transform a situation, we must acknowledge that this Internet version of the performative utterance comes in the form of a question. A search term or phrase, whether fragment, “mashed potatoes” or “mashed potato recipes” or full interrogative “how do I make mashed potatoes?” always asks a question. This question, when used to activate the search algorithms of a search engine, then pulls up page after page of results, effectively materializing that information for the user. Thus, the retrieval of a web-based artifact through some imperative or some interrogative, that is, some performative statement or action, as described by Derrida, “produces or transforms a situation, it effects” (Derrida 13). These artifacts, therefore, must be written to be read; they thus become rewritten into a new context: the context of the question to which they serve as answer.

The search query thus constitutes a performative utterance in its calling up of information. It describes the thing which it intuits is out there but for which no location is known, while it also calls that thing into being by entering a search query that is answered by the text’s materialization. The text is then transformed as the result of being called forth in search because it becomes a new answer and thus a new text each time it appears in response to a different string of search terms.