The Googlization of Everything: is Google Really the Best We Can Do?

 The book that I am writing about is The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan. It is about the variety of effects (both good and bad) that Google's rise to prominence has had. Being from 2011, it is drawing on a different set of information than we have now, but most of its points still stand. The author concludes that we could and should do better than allowing a single young, private entity to be our gateway to the world.

The book begins by examining how Google rose to prominence in the early days of the Web. During that time, the was not a really good way to navigate the Web. Google Search filled that gap. The book then turns to how Google conducts itself and how it solves problems; its "ways and means". Google tends to assume that any problem can be solved mathematically and algorithmically, which sometimes causes problems.

The book then turns to the various things that have been "Googlized," beginning with us, its users. Google relies for both the quality of the service that it offers to its users and the revenue from its advertising customers on huge amounts of information that it collects. While it is possible to disable most of its data collection, it is on by default, so one must know that the settings are possible to change and how to do so. Next to have its Googlization analyzed is the world. Google's forays into the global sphere (as opposed to solely the United States, where it began) have often met with challenges, from both governments and people (such as its tenuous relationship with Communist China) as well as more technical obstacles (such as the fact that Google was designed in English and thus does not work as well with non-Latin scripts).

Next are the related concepts of knowledge and memory. Much of human knowledge is contained in books. Since Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", it is not surprising that it tried to incorporate books into its services. This was of course met with legal pushback from publishers who felt their copyrights were being infringed, which at the time of the writing of the book was unresolved. The author argues that while the digitization of books is useful, Google is not the right agent to do so. On the topic of memory, Google has made a tremendous amount of information available rapidly, which has made it less important to remember facts. It is possible that Google is making people less proficient at doing high-quality research. Google's wealth has made many great accomplishments possible, but as the author states, "If Google is the lens through which we see the world, we all might be cursed to wander the earth, blinded by ambition."

In conclusion, the author proposes a "Human Knowledge Project", a global, public, open project to achieve Google's mission of organizing and making accessible all of the world's information, but without being tied to short-term commercial interests. He draws a parallel to the Human Genome Project, an open project to sequence the human genome that competed against a private company trying to do the same. He emphasizes that while private-sector involvement will likely be needed, completely relying on "some big, rich company" is "simply irresponsible."

I thought that this was an interesting, insightful book that made many good points. Being from 10 years ago, its points need to be slightly rethought in the context of our current world; as the author notes, the Google of 1998 is different from the Google of 2008 which is different from the Google of 2021. I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in technology and/or its effects on human civilization.

-Nibaw