What is the alternative to Google bubbles?

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of concern about how Google’s tailored search is creating bubbles of opinion. In short, their algorithms use your browsing history, location and social connections to decide how to rank the search results for any given keyword. So if you live in Austria, browse a lot of fashion websites and talk a lot of science with those in your network you’re more likely to see things related to fashionable Austrian scientists than, say, bohemian French linguists.

The argument in favour of this is all about relevancy – that Google is showing you things that have a connection with your life rather than things that are alien – and it’s a good one. Google strives be a kind of digital assistant and a good assistant is one who knows you better than you know yourself. A Jeeves to the searching Wooster, if you like.

But the argument against is also quite strong. As we see with the Twitter model (and, indeed, in offline activity on the whole) by choosing who we listen to we limit the range of opinions, ideas and so on we are exposed to, thus limiting our capacity to understand and empathise with those outside out of cultural corner. It it possible to break out of this by actively exposing oneself to new things, which is why we have things like libraries and public spaces and, indeed, the Internet. Which is where it starts to get troublesome.

For many people their access to new things is the Google search box. If that algorithm is tainted by knowing them too well then it becomes harder to experience the new. And not in the blunt “I heard you liked chicken so here is some chicken” way but in subtle ways that only become fully apparent when it’s brought home to you that actually not everyone thinks like you do.

A counter argument is that our social networks, while not perfect, give us access to a much broader range of voices and ideas than the pre-Internet world did, but I’m not sure this has a much weight as it did a few of years ago. When online social activity was a relatively rare thing it was necessary to mix with people you wouldn’t normally mix with to reach your Dunbar number. But in the last year it’s become quite possible, I think, to filter out, and demonise, The Other online much more effectively than ever before. I wouldn’t want to say things like the Norwegian shootings or the collapse of compromise in US politics are due to this but it might be worth investigating.

But there’s a counter-counter argument to that, which is to ask how you’d rather your search results were ranked. And this is one that rarely seems to be asked. Google give the user a number of ways to filter the results but always from the same master list. There’s no option to change the criteria by which the master list was compiled, to look at Google through the eyes of another. That would be a nice option to have.

Because, ultimately, the notion of One Search Result To Rule Them All is a dangerous fallacy that should be discarded. It’s seductive because we’re used to having arbiters of knowledge be they editors of newspapers or compilers of encyclopaedias, but we forget that while this system worked pretty well it was, to paraphrase Churchill, the least worst solution. As any sociologist will tell you there is bias inherent in any system, particularly where power and money are involved.

Google are very wise to move away from the notion of a “pure” search result. It helps deal with the problem of those who would game their algorithms, for sure, but it also helps move how we find things on the Internet away from a totalitarian model towards something more subtle. Putting social into the mix is logical because social is the big thing at the moment, powerful enough to fuzz up the numbers within a model that’s matured over the decade. But social alone, especially as it stands, is still a blunt tool that brings new issues and problems with it. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.

It’s worth remembering that all this stuff is still incredibly new and nothing that currently stands monolithic is guaranteed to be here in a decade. Look at Yahoo, you Facebooks and Googles, and weep, for that is your destiny, mere footnotes in a story going back centuries.

Still, as reassuring as that might be, we still have to live through it. Let’s hope the best minds of our generation stop thinking about how to make people click ads and start thinking about how to make finding stuff even fuzzier.