The Laboratorium: The Google Dilemma
I’ve posted online my latest draft, The Google Dilemma. It’s based on a couple of talks I gave this spring—one to a group of high-school students and one to a group of law students. Very loosely, it’s an attempt to explain why people should care about search engine law. I take five search queries—two of them seemingly harmless and three highly controversial—and tell their stories. How does Google decide which sites to return in response to one of them, and whose ox is gored when it does? It’s short—by legal academic standards, at least—and, I hope, both readable and entertaining.
Here is the abstract:
Web search is critical to our ability to use the Internet. Whoever controls search engines
has enormous influence on all of us. They can shape what we read, who we listen to, who gets
heard. Whoever controls the search engines, perhaps, controls the Internet itself. Today, no one
comes closer to controlling search than Google does.
In this short essay, I’ll describe a few of the ways that individuals, companies, and even
governments have tried to shape Google’s results to serve their goals. Specifically, I’ll tell the
stories of five Google queries, each of which illustrates a different aspect of the problems that
Google and other search engines must confront:
• “mongolian gerbils” shows their power to organize the Internet for us.
• “talentless hack” shows how their rankings depend on collective human knowledge.
• “jew” shows why search results can be controversial.
• “search king” shows the tension between automatic algorithms and human oversight.
• “ tiananmen” shows how deeply political search can be.
Taken together, these five stories give us a snapshot on search and the interlocking issues
that search law must confront.
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