Search Is the Destination

In order to access or retrieve any computer file or website, one must know the name, address, or general location of the text. However, the issue of access is complicated. There is the question of finding what one knows is there but isn’t sure how to find, and there is the deeper question of finding what one doesn’t know is there. In the pre- or non-digital world, in order to access a text one doesn’t know exists, a recommendation is necessary—by another text, a friend, a teacher, a snippet from a film, maybe something like the Dewey Decimal System’s categories. Then, the recommendation must be compelling enough for one to find the reference, borrow it, or go out and purchase it. In other words, the recommendation must be memorable enough to sustain the protracted search that will ensue. What about in the digital world though: does accessing the unknown-unknown involve a different process? This is where, as the Internet and its problems of access grew, the search engine came in.

In order, though, to talk about search engines, one must first address the “portal website.” The portal website is, as the name implies, a go-to site that serves as an entranceway to the rest of the Web. Portals such as Yahoo! employ teams of editors and ontologists to group information by determined categories, as well as to create value, in so-called “editors’ picks,” “best bets on the Web,” or simply “Headlines.” Here, the authority of the portal operator is implicitly trusted. But, as Clay Shirky points out in his Web-focused lecture Ontology Is Overrated, there’s a problem with this kind of organization:

Look for the word “queer” in almost any top-level categorization. You will not find it, even though, as an organizing principle for a large group of people, that word matters enormously. Users don’t get to participate in those kinds of discussions [in] traditional categorization schemes.

Even though, as this passage implies, there may be some substitute category for “queer,” the problem is that anything indexed under that politically correct heading was probably also found using politically correct search terms, which means anything written outside that language wouldn’t be included. The point that Shirky makes here is that if a user doesn’t have the ability to search using his or her own personal categorization scheme, the nuances of his or her desired terms of search will be lost.

Portal sites thus contain a built-in exclusionary possibility, and thus inevitability, even as they attempt to provide access to the masses. Portal websites were not constructed as means of hiding or diverting access to information; on the contrary, they were constructed to make it possible for users to find anything. Unfortunately, the categories failed, mainly because categories devised by a select few just didn’t translate to the masses who went searching online every day. Just as language, as a part of its structure, can lose track of its author’s intentions, so too, these portal websites’ intentions of access were diverted. As Derrida asserts, “a possible risk—is always possible, and is in some sense a necessary possibility,” meaning for portal sites that part of what made their existence possible was their exclusion of lots of confusing and contradictory data (“Signature Event Context” 15). The result? Portal Websites mean users are only able to find information that adheres to a small group of editors’ concepts of category and value. If the popular adoption of Internet as information central was something of a Big Bang, an explosion and proliferation of strings of potential energy and data, the nearly immediate reaction by those who wanted to create meaning of all that information was the opposite: a sharp contraction of all that potential into little dense spheres of category, light years apart and with no real means of meaningful interaction or overlap. Search on the Web, therefore, started as a top-down process of adding meaning to a mass of information by imposing on it arbitrary and essentially univocal values.

It must be acknowledged here, though, that a need for some means of access, whether top-down or not, was necessary at the time portal websites were created because “early on you couldn’t put a search box in front of people and expect that they would know what to do. . .users were new to the experience; there were no preset habits attendant to [web] surfing” (Battelle). For this reason, portal sites websites included search capabilities, although content was still mainly composed of listings of categories, which were meant to make it easier for users to find what they were looking for—a particular book could be found under the heading “Books,” for example. “A hierarchical approach simply made sense for a public trying to understand the wild and rather disorganized chaos of the early Web. As surfers moved from a stance of exploration (‘What’s out there’) to expectation (I want to find something that I know is out there’), search as a navigational metaphor began to make more sense,” which is where those little search boxes found their genesis (Battelle).

As users began to comprehend that there was plenty available on the Web and that they only needed to find the right path to that information, the search box began to be used much more than before. Here, a blinking cursor and blank box transferred responsibility to the user, asking, “what do you want to see?” Still, search engines remained somewhat unreliable. Unless a user knew the perfect query with which to call up a piece of information, that information still lay hidden. The reason for this has to do with the structure of the search engines and the documents themselves. Each relied heavily on its authors to generate certain “meta” (that is, self-referential) information by which it could be categorized, identified, and thus found. The algorithms created by the search engines’ programmers made assumptions about types of categories and the ways information could be relevant to an individual. In short, search engines undermined the success of their endeavors by using the ideas and work of a select few to create value and relevance for many. Additionally, search terms were at first near-impossible to come up with, because as John Battelle points out in The Search, “in the initial stages of the Internet, [. . .] no one knew what was out there.” Because both user and search engine had to practice asking and answering relevant questions (finding an iterable structure) before they got any good at it, searchers and search engines all had to consider—“what is relevant?”

At that relatively early stage of search, there was no way for users or search engines to know what was out there, let alone what was relevant—because search engines had not yet indexed everything on the Web, or the ways they had categorized their indexed material was impossible for a user to anticipate, which made coming up with a relevant search term nearly impossible. Further, as many early search engines found out, selecting from a “dizzying array of choices” was hard for users, as well as for the search engines themselves. Search engines found that their methods of ranking information, based on all kinds of meta-text was unreliable, either because its authors didn’t realize exactly how the information they used as meta text contradicted the purpose of their site or because they were simply trying to manipulate the system in order to achieve a higher ranking. In the same way that in language, according to Derrida, “the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and to its content,” web utterances were often contradictory and authorial intentions diverted. Because of these difficulties, early in the game it was very nearly impossible to get a result relevant to what one might be searching for. So, although the searcher intuited that the information must be out there, there was no way to access it—it may as well not have existed.

What Google innovated was a technology called PageRank that revolutionized the way search works. Its creators increased the relevancy of websites returned in a search by incorporating the age-old idea that “the process of citing others confers their rank and authority upon you” (Battelle). In order to measure rank and authority, Google set up an algorithm that managed to take into account both the number of links leading into a particular site, and the number of links exiting into each of the linking sites, which “mirror[s] the rough approach of academic citation counting. . .” (Battelle). With this innovation, Google placed more importance on what others said about a site rather than what the site’s author may have said about him or herself. In this way, the search began to expand the network without author, without source, without center, ranking everything in relation to every other piece of information—rather than ranking it for “truth” value or authorial intent, a text is valued on its ability to spread, to network, and to be referred to by others.

As Google and its complicated algorithms evolved toward increasing relevance in search, individual users also began to learn what kinds of search queries returned relevant results, and as they did so, modified their search behavior. In fact, Battelle points out that users generally enter five search terms each time they’re looking for something, suggesting that users refine and revise their method of questioning until it turns up something useful to their needs. Another component of Google-style search is the information itself—the bank of websites out there competing to be seen on that coveted first page of search results in Google. These websites also take into consideration how users might search for their particular brand of information, and successful website design and SEO (search engine optimization) incorporates keywords and meta-information designed to be the most relevant result to a user’s search within that category. Knowing that websites will try to find ways of being relevant, whether they have the user’s best interest or search intent in mind or not, Google uses secret, complex algorithms based on a combination of keywords, images, headlines, and citation found within a site in order to prevent website designers from pretending to be more relevant than they really are.

But there’s a limit to these search engines, and that limit is the algorithm that determines relevancy. There is a trade-off. Although users learn better to intuit how others might categorize information, and learn to ask all kinds of questions to find what they want, search engine responses can only be as good as the temporary and secret algorithms the company programmers use to separate ‘”real” relevance from “false” relevance.” The effect of the Google-style search engine is that while it provides far more relevant results than portal websites and earlier search engines, it always contains in its results the dangers of irrelevant results, that is, positive search engine placement that was ill-gotten because the designer of a website was trying to “game” the system in his or her favor to appear at the top of the list of results. In much the way Derrida lays out the idea that “the structure of possibility of this utterance” intelligible, although mistaken, misleading, or badly formed. . .”includes the capability to be formed and to function as a reference that is empty or cut off from its referent,” every supposedly relevant search engine result contains within it the possibility that it may simultaneously be the same and different from what it cites, because relevance only becomes a goal when irrelevance threatens to overtake it.

Nevertheless, search, especially Google, continues to be a destination for most designers of content for the web, first of all, because it works when you want reliable, repeatable, relevant information, and second of all, because businesses or artists or politicians attempting to sell themselves on the web have no better way of reaching the public than by appearing in the number one slot on the first page of results in Google. “Visit us on the web” is just the new way of sending a customer to the best possible source of marketing and sales, no longer a brick-and-mortar establishment, but a virtual marketplace.