The externalities of Search 2.0: The flow of personal information in the drive for the perfect search engine

Abstract

AbstractWeb search engines have emerged as a ubiquitous and vital tool for the successful navigation of the growing online informational sphere. As Google puts it, their goal is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” and to create the “perfect search engine” that provides only intuitive, personalized, and relevant results. Meanwhile, new Web 2.0 infrastructures have emerged with the promise to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks. The (inevitable) combining of Google's suite of information‐seeking products with Web 2.0 infrastructures – what I call Search 2.0 – intends to capture the best of both technical systems for the benefit of users. By capturing the information flowing across Web 2.0, search engines can better predict users' needs and wants, and deliver more relevant and meaningful results. While intended to enhance intellectual mobility in the online sphere, this paper argues that the drive for Search 2.0 necessarily requires the widespread monitoring and aggregation of a users' online personal and intellectual activities, bringing with it particular value externalities, such as the privacy of individuals' online intellectual activities. These search‐based infrastructures of dataveillance contribute to a rapidly emerging “soft cage” of everyday digital surveillance, where they, like other dataveillance technologies before them, contribute to the curtailing of individual freedom, affect users' sense of self, and present issues of deep discrimination and social justice.