The Digital Economy. Tim Jordan

the WWW and data on searchers – to the monetisation of targeted ads. Three terms are then pushing their way to the fore in these digital economic practices: community, trust and privacy. In conclusion, it is worth highlighting these more explicitly, as part of an abstract diagram of search as a digital economic practice to be further developed with other case studies.

A search engine has to create answers to questions and deliver them in micro-seconds. It has to have something to ‘read’ to inform its answers, and in the majority of cases this consists of two target populations. One is those who create the World Wide Web and particularly the chance this offers to explore the sub-groups within it; the other is consequent on the first and largely consists of those who search the Web, whose activities on their travels are recorded and correlated, using data analysis to ‘read’ these journeys. This reading then informs both the search results and who is targeted with which ads. ‘Community’ is often a hard to define and awkward to use word, implying much and delivering little, but in the context of search as a digital economic practice it can refer to these two sources that search engines rely on to generate information. The meaning of community in other digital economic practices will be further explored in subsequent case studies.

      A search engine needs trust. The comparison of Baidu and Google on paying for search results to be integrated among the ‘purer’ results bring this issue to the fore. If a searcher does not trust a search engine to deliver at least reasonable results, then the use of the engine comes into question. This is exacerbated by the obscurity of search processes, particularly in relation to key algorithms remaining jealously guarded trade secrets. The existence of DuckDuckGo – along with Mojeek, which has a similar ethical stance on searching and privacy – points to a growing understanding of the importance of trust.

      Privacy should perhaps be understood as ‘privacy and surveillance’, for the ‘reading’ of communities in their two dimensions creates detailed maps of individuals’ preferences, all the better to deliver advertisements. Google has sometimes claimed that it is not in the advertising business but sees advertisements as knowledge and that it simply wishes to deliver better knowledge to its users, in line with its mission statement ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Yet its search results, like those of other search engines, come at a cost which threatens trust, not so much in terms of their accuracy, but by their breaching of privacy, which becomes obvious when ads are targeted at users who can hardly miss the way Mickey Mouse or beach holidays follow them around the WWW. To fuel search as a free service, communities have to give up information on their social relations, and to refine the search, individuals have to give up data about themselves in order to be profiled – to be identified as the same as or different from other individuals. All this raises issues of privacy and of how search engines manage to retain trust.

Following the digital economic practice of search through three different perspectives – users, advertisers and search engine companies – has offered a clear view of what is probably the greatest money-gushing land grab, oil boom and gold rush of the twenty-first century: reading communities to target ads. The billions of dollars in profit are evidence of this. Behind this practice lies the intersection of three dynamics – community, trust and privacy/surveillance – that together make up an abstract diagram of the digital economic practice of search. But this is only one such practice, and further examples will help complicate and extend our understanding of the digital economy.

Notes

1 Technically, these figures are from Alphabet Inc., the conglomerate that controls Google and a number of other businesses. As Google is the largest of the companies in Alphabet I will avoid the distraction of referring to Alphabet and refer to the whole conglomeration as Google. 2 At the time of writing, Google was undergoing an internal controversy over creating a China-specific search engine that some employees objected to as they believed it would enable spying and censorship (Mayer 2018).