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The Gaze of the Perfect Search Engine: Google as an Infrastructure of Dataveillance

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Web Search

Part of the book series: Information Science and Knowledge Management ((ISKM,volume 14))

Summary

Web search engines have emerged as a ubiquitous and vital tool for the successful navigation of the growing online informational sphere. The goal of the world’s largest search engine, Google, 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. While intended to enhance intellectual mobility in the online sphere, this chapter reveals that the quest for the perfect search engine requires the widespread monitoring and aggregation of a users’ online personal and intellectual activities, threatening the values the perfect search engines were designed to sustain. It argues that 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.

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  1. Information Society Project, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA

    M. Zimmer Ph.D.

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  1. Faculty of Information Technology Gardens Point Campus, Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St., Brisbane, QLD, 4001, Australia

    Amanda Spink

  2. Information Society Project, Yale Law School, 127 Wall Street, New Haven, CT, 06520, USA

    Michael Zimmer

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Zimmer, M. (2008). The Gaze of the Perfect Search Engine: Google as an Infrastructure of Dataveillance. In: Spink, A., Zimmer, M. (eds) Web Search. Information Science and Knowledge Management, vol 14. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75829-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75829-7_6

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