If it doesn’t show up on Google, does it exist?

In honour of Google’s 10th birthday, the company has released their oldest available search index to the public. You can search on it and it will provide results based on 2001 data. It is very interesting to note the differences in the results that show up on the pages and how much change there has been in the past seven years of web history. If available, you’ll be able to see archived versions of sites as well, along with ads for old products (see News24 for instance), provided courtesy of the Internet Archive. What is more interesting, however, is how our experience of the web can be dominated and defined by one company, which is not necessarily a good thing.

The critical insight that one should gain from such an exercise is how sites like Google have managed to define internet territory. The age-old philosophical problem of whether a falling tree makes a sound if nobody hears it comes to mind. Google, and to a far lesser extent Yahoo and Live, have changed the riddle: if it doesn’t show up on Google, does it exist? Many companies in the space, such as those in search engine optimization (SEO), will tell you that if your site doesn’t feature on Google, it simply doesn’t exist. And unfortunately this is probably true.

It is important to see how strategically inclined Google is towards mapping (explicitly Google Maps and Earth but less obviously Google.com ). Indeed, Google is essentially a mapping company — its objective is to map the digital and physical worlds — and I predict it will be looking in the future to map our minds (see a parody post I did of this a while back) and thoughts. This can have both good and bad consequences and we should be hesitant to allow one company essentially to dominate our mode of seeing and experiencing the world.

The semanticist Korzybski’s remark that ‘the map is not the territory’ should keep us cognizant of the potential for Google to define what exists and what does not exist for us in the virtual and, by extension, real world. Of course it can be argued that we are free to use or not use Google as we please, but it is obvious that Google’s entrance into the browser market with Chrome, with built in search functionality, as well as their mobile OS Android, is an attempt to reinforce their dominance over our worldly experience.

It’s beyond the scope of this post to look into the revenue benefits to a company that dominates our experience, but for Google it’s ingenious. For the rest of us, well, let’s just keep our eyes and minds open.