Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for May 2006
Nobody’s ever accused me of not being able to take a hint. Well, OK, in all honesty, lots of people have, including several likely reading this column (you know who you are).
Anyway, a couple of years ago, I taught a course here at the University of Washington’s iSchool about Google. I assumed it would be a little one-credit seminar with a dozen or so people. We’d do some readings, have some discussion, maybe play with the search engine a little bit, and that would be that. Shows you what I know: 59 students and several media stories later (including one on the same page of the March 14, 2004, Sunday New York Times style section as Joan Rivers), we had a very different class than I’d anticipated.
After two years of being asked to teach it again, I led a follow-up class this past winter with a more focused theme: What is Google? My students investigated and analyzed the firm’s current products and services to better understand its business, motivations, and so on, and then discussed what they thought Google is, what it’s trying to be, and whether there’s a grand plan or strategy locked in a vault in the Googleplex down in Mountain View, California. Finally, they had to devise and present a product or service they believed would fit in with whatever it was Google was trying to be.
’Twas fascinating, let me tell you. There was great subtlety and depth to the class’s thinking and discussions. Here are some highlights, starting with some of the products they pitched. How about web authoring and hosting capacity? Or a fee-based audio service, à la iTunes? Perhaps a service to integrate with a Tivo-like device to search for, record, store, and maintain all things television for the couch potato in us all? (Sign me up for that one.)
I found three ideas in particular to be most thought-provoking. Mark Bardsley merged user-defined tags (such as those on del.icio.us) with PageRank producing FolkRank, to improve relevance of retrievals. Simple, very clever, and quite possibly workable. Aaron Kemp proposed Google Garage, envisioned as specialized search functionality for DIY projects. I was particularly taken with his idea to automatically recognize searches that begin with phrases like “how to” or “how do I”; seemed pretty powerful to me.
Finally, two ideas, independently very similar, from Reece Dano and Sonja Engelsen. Each proposed automatically scanning the text of Gmail and Google Talk messages, searches, and the like, to determine people’s likes and dislikes, and use those to match them with other like-minded people for friendship or dating.
This, to me, is perfectly Googlesque: probably very useful and helpful, attractive to a target demographic of young, technologically sophisticated people, easy to understand and probably to implement, and spooky as all get-out. I can see the news story now, complete with barbed complaints from the Electronic Privacy Information Center folks.
So now for the punch line—what is Google? Many, many things; and in fact, the more you look, the more there is, and the more areas the firm appears to want to be a part of. And while there does seem to be “a plan” (the February 20 Time cover story mentions a top-secret List of 100 Priorities), the company also seems to do things that strike an individual and even idiosyncratic fancy. Google Movies, anyone?
To unsatisfactorily summarize weeks of discussion, Google is: an advertiser, fast, a publicly traded company with all the implications that suggests, the product of good intentions, and big—and therefore perhaps almost necessarily an object of suspicion.
Most of all, I think, Google is a conduit. The company has always been less interested in creating content than in leading people to it—more a means to an end than an end in itself. As someone in the class discussion put it, a one-stop shop for searching. Many people searched for corporate metaphors, trying on Wal-Mart or McDonald’s for size; they have their parallels but didn’t quite seem to fit. (Surprisingly, given its corporate mission, Google-as-library barely came up.)
I proposed department stores as my Google-metaphor, specifically the Sears of my childhood, Wish Book and all. Sears didn’t produce much itself, but you could get almost anything there, and their stores were everywhere. Metaphors are tricky things, though. After over a century, Sears wound up being more valuable for its buildings and land than as a retailer, and is now a glorified real-estate holding company owned by K-Mart. An object lesson of sorts . . . but that’s another story.