Search & Destroy — An Early Warning about Google’s Information Power

Google came to be associated with innovation because its search engine solved a problem people met every day. Other products made it easier to find an address, write to somebody or watch a video.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s company became familiar enough for “google” to enter ordinary English as a verb. That tells you how thoroughly search became part of daily life.

Gmail, Maps, Search and YouTube make the company visible in many different parts of the day. The same breadth that makes the services convenient raises questions about how much one company can see.

The Shelf of Books about Google

Many books about Google describe how it succeeded and ask what other companies could learn from it.

The founders’ story made good material. Android, with its open-source core, also extended Google’s influence as phones became a common way to get online.

There was a market for practical guides too. For one reader Google was a company to study, for another a collection of tools to learn.

A company can do things worth learning from and still acquire enough power to make an outsider uneasy.

A Book about the Side That Worries Its Authors

Scott Cleland and Ira Brodsky’s Search & Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc. is a polemic. It takes the success story people knew and asks what it leaves out.

Their first concern is the concentration of information. They question what users know or consent to when a service collects personal data while providing something useful.

Information can give an organisation leverage. The authors ask what happens if a company with an unusually large view of online activity begins using that position in ways a customer did not expect.

At its most sweeping, the book imagines the concentration of data leading to much more extensive social control. It offers that as a warning.

The Disputes behind an Image of Innovation

Google’s public image rested partly on making useful things and partly on a belief that the company worked differently from its predecessors. The book spends much of its time challenging that image.

It traces paid search back to Bill Gross and GoTo.com and discusses patent disputes that arose as competing ad businesses developed. The authors use the example to contest a simple account in which Google invented the model by itself.

They also criticise Google’s approach to copyright after acquiring YouTube. In their view, relying on rightsholders to identify material put too much of the burden on the people whose work had been uploaded.

The book also cites Oracle’s dispute over Java code in Android. Litigation is evidence that there was a dispute. It takes more than the filing of a claim to establish what either party did.

What a Search Service Can Record

Searches can generate records of what people type and where or how they use a service. The authors worry about what can happen when such records are kept and used together.

The book also discusses an advertising practice from its period. Google previously used information from consumer Gmail messages in ad personalisation and announced in 2017 that it would end that practice.

Cleland and Brodsky were also concerned about what deletion means. Removing a message from the user’s view and knowing how long it remains in a system are different things.

What the Authors Think an Opaque Company Could Do

They worry about how search ranking can affect what a person finds and what remains hard to find. That is a serious question about the design of a product many people depend on.

The book goes further by imagining cooperation with other powerful organisations to influence what people can see. Those scenarios are presented as possibilities.

The argument takes its force from the scale at which a choice about ranking can have consequences. Concentration gives readers a reason to ask how the choice is made.

How to Read a Warning about Concentrated Power

The authors see the danger in how much information can pass through one company. They use the history of concentrated power to explain their suspicion of assurances from the company itself.

I would have liked a fuller account of how decisions were made inside Google. That might have made it easier to distinguish the things the authors could show from the things they feared.

Books such as Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules! and accounts of working in Silicon Valley tell a different part of the story. Reading them alongside this one makes it easier to see what each writer has chosen to look at.

Search & Destroy is still useful as a record of concerns raised early enough that some of the practices it names have since changed. The question of how to scrutinise a company with that reach remains.

Book Information

Search & Destroy: Why You Can’t Trust Google Inc.

Authors

Scott Cleland and Ira Brodsky

Publication

31 May 2012 (Korean edition)

ISBN13

9788960773080

View the book on YES24

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