Searching to be seen

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on search's fragmented future. This is the second installment in a two-part series. You can read the article in its entirety on Dirt's site here.

Attention is the internet’s unofficial currency. Revenue pumped into search engine optimization is integral to how the web has freely operated for the past two decades. For most of that history, Google has maintained a virtual monopoly over the advertising marketplace. It has also invested billions to maintain this position, paying Apple an estimated $15 billion every year to be the default search engine on its devices.

Google has constructed an unchallenged web advertising model that essentially gave rise to SEO as a marketing discipline. The company launched AdWords in 2000, an automated auction system for advertisers to bid on the sponsored spots of a search results page. (That means a virtual auction occurs every time a person runs a search on Google or visits a site with ads.) In 2003, Google launched its AdSense program, which allowed website owners to place targeted ads. And in 2007, it acquired DoubleClick to enable display ads on third-party websites, which are targeted to users based on their interests and browsing behavior. Today, primary ad placement is still something advertisers pay top dollar for.

Shouldn’t TikTok’s emergence be a good thing, then? After all, competition ensures capitalism’s health.

US officials have filed five antitrust lawsuits against Google since 2020, challenging its monopoly in the digital ad space (The Justice Department filed the most recent suit in January). TikTok may have won over users, but advertisers are hesitant. The platform isn’t a formal search engine, in the sense that it isn’t a middleman like Google, directing users to specific web pages. Some see TikTok as a fickle propellant towards virality with a lower conversion rate than Google. Marketers also have less insight into its ranking algorithm and ad placements. With Google, at least, advertisers are familiar with what they’re paying for.

This lasting faith in Google has bolstered its reputation and disguised its flaws. In her book Algorithms of Oppression, internet studies scholar Safiya Noble highlighted cases of “algorithmically driven data failures that are specific to people of color and women.” The book outlined the structural ways that racism and sexism are fundamental to search engine algorithms, which are fueled by a lack of data or programming biases.

“Google’s enviable position as the monopoly leader in the provision of information has allowed its organization of information and customization to be driven by its economic imperatives and has influenced broad swathes of society to see it as the creator and keeper of information culture online,” Noble writes. Algorithmic oppression is no accident; it’s fundamental to how the internet operates. Noble’s research underscores how Google consistently delivers results that range from the unhelpful to the explicitly racist. Search results for “black girls” have prompted users towards sexually explicit queries, like “big booty,” or offered emotionally charged suggestions, like “why black women are so angry.” While European citizens have fought for the right to be forgotten by Google, others have yet to be properly known by search algorithms.

Finding information that is specific to an individual’s needs often requires a lot more work on formal search engines like Google. Most of the data collected globally on people use men as a reference point, from medical to economic data. This has contributed to what experts have called the gender data gap: Women and gender non-conforming people are less likely to have their experiences accounted for in statistical surveys and trend data.

Years ago, Emma Bates struggled to find trustworthy anecdotes on the morning after pill’s potential side effects. The clinical results Google presented her were useful, but limited. She wanted to hear directly from women her age. “Oftentimes, people aren’t searching for facts. They’re searching for validation or for an experience to relate to. They want to understand if this experience they’re having is normal,” Bates said. “There really isn’t a place on the internet that encourages people to share vulnerable information in a safe environment, with technology that synthesizes and fact-checks that information, as well as allowing other searchers to discover that information further down the line.”

In 2020, Bates and Divya Singh co-founded Diem, a platform that positions itself as a Quora-like “social search” engine. They wanted to offer a centralized social component to search that many users crave, regarding topics like women’s and reproductive health, relationships, and personal finance. “We think of ourselves as the place where you go if your friends don’t have the answer to a question. For example, what if you’re pregnant but someone in your life is dealing with fertility issues. What’s a way you can go about sharing your pregnancy?”

This is perhaps another reason why users are compelled to search on TikTok. Their For You page makes them “feel seen” before they input a query. They are more likely to be met with a sympathetic human face, rather than a keyword-laden post. There is comfort in curated, anecdotal advice; it feels like a friend talking from experience. The response is always intimate and almost always interesting, even if it’s not clinical or factual.

“People go to TikTok or Twitter for search because they know what they’re finding right now is more interesting than what’s on Google,” said Brereton. The same could be said for newly-released AI chatbots like Bing and Bard; they are personalized but not personal. Users are drawn to their novelty—and the novelty of the search experience, rather than its functionality.

Searching feels much more satisfying when a user’s algorithmic librarian, so to speak, can anticipate these needs, surfacing potential responses, products, recommendations, and desires they weren’t aware of in the first place. Our searches contain our private truths. They are a window into our psyche that we divulge through keywords and phrases, in return for insight about ourselves or those like us. Google places the onus of discovery on the searcher themselves. We have to ask for what we want. Even then, we might not receive it. In this current state of affairs, what is the point of Google if we have to be our own librarian?

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