Info 202 Fall 2011

Several recent articles have talked about the effects Google has on our thinking. As we talk about IR, we should consider the impact the systems we design might have on the way people think.

The same magazine that published Vannevar Bush’s prescient
article predicting the web as we know it today, published an equally seminal
article predicting the downfall of thinking as we know it thanks to the
ubiquity of the internet and search. In Is
Google Making Us Stupid, Nicolas Carr asks the question does the web change
how we think and does it change it for the worse? The first question can be
answered straightforwardly: yes. All technology shapes the way we think. The act
of writing out our ideas requires very different skills and cognitive processes
than the act of speaking. The act of reading similarly engages the brain in different
ways than the act of listening or watching. But does different mean bad? The
answer to that is complex, to put it mildly, but recent research shows we
remember less when we think we can search for that information later.

The argument about the effects of technology on our brains
goes as far back as the introduction of writing. Socrates feared that writing
things down would ruin our ability to remember. Why remember if you can just
look it up later? While I doubt anyone seriously thinks writing has made us
dumber, the same question can be asked about the web and search. Does having
the ability to search for information mean we’re less likely to remember that
information later? That’s exactly what researchers at Columbia aimed to find
out. In one study, researchers gave participants various facts to type up. Half
of the group was told the computer would save the facts, the other half was
told that the facts would be erased. The participants who thought the facts
would be lost remembered those facts better. In a second study, researchers
asked people to remember both the fact as well as which of the five computer
folders stored the particular fact. Surprisingly, participants were better at
remembering where the fact was located
and not the fact itself.

I’ve certainly felt similar effects in the way I think,
especially with Google in my pocket these days. Rather than remembering the
whole article or story or fact, I’ve become accustomed to remembering the
keywords I can use to recall the information later. Debates with friends are no
longer resolved with convincing arguments and intellect. They’re resolved with
a quick Google search. I know many of us relied heavily on searchable notes
from lecture for the 202 midterm rather than spending the hours needed to
commit all that information to memory.

We’ve talked about the next evolution of searching being
DWIM, or Do What I Mean, not what I say. As search engines get better at DWIM,
I predict we’ll process information even more shallowly. The process of
translating our information needs into intelligent, well thought-out queries is
a form of thinking, creating connections in our brain between concepts and
words, reinforcing our knowledge along the way. In the future, if I’m able to
search for ‘the thing I was looking at last night about that stuff’ and Google
can magically find it, I have to do even less thinking about the topic. Less
thinking is generally not a good thing.

People will always bemoan the changes technology cause on
the existing ways of doing things. Even Carr ponders if he’s just being a
worrywart about the internet. Rather than pointing the finger at a specific
technology, however, I wonder if we should look at what we do with the free
time we’ve gained thanks to technological advances. Writing things down allowed
us to spend more time discovering new things rather than spending all our time
remembering old things. The printing press allowed us to read more. What has
the internet and search allowed us to spend more time doing? My hunch is we’re
not using that free time to pursue more highbrow endeavors. Instead, we’re
using that extra time to cultivate pumpkins on Farmville and watch cats ride
Roombas on YouTube. 

What is
being organized?

Web pages,
facts, books, stocks, flights, images, maps, news, blogs, videos, email, music…
you name it, Google organizes it in some way.

Why it
is being organized?

Google
would have you believe it organizes the web to make it accessible and useful. After
all, the company’s mission states its goal is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally
accessible and useful.” There’s
no doubt that Google has tamed the sprawl of the web. I for one wouldn’t want
to go back to a pre-Google era. However, that original altruistic goal of
information access now competes with the goal of organizing that information to
make money. The better organized the web, the more targeted the advertising can
be and the more money Google can make. As Carr puts it “Most of the proprietors of the commercial
Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave
behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing
these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated
thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.”

 

How
much is it being organized?

By using
full text indices, term frequencies, metadata, anchor text, location data,
presentation data, links and PageRank, user behavior and more, Google organizes
the web in a deep, multifaceted fashion.  For any given document on the web, Google
probably has hundreds of data points that can be used in a weighted vector-based
model for retrieval.

 

When is
it being organized?

Google
organizes incessantly. It organizes on
the way in as we’ve seen with our discussion of IR techniques. Traditional
IR techniques like inverted indices, term frequencies and document frequencies are
just the beginning. Google also organizes on
the way out.  Once it’s found all the
relevant documents, Google sorts those documents by relevancy as defined by
PageRank along with additional features like freshness, personal search
history, other users’ click behavior, etc. Google doesn’t organize once and for
all time either. The index is constantly updated based on new inputs.

 

By whom
(or by what computational processes) it is being organized?

Google
prides itself on its purely algorithmic approach to organization although it’s
recently incorporated human judgments (+1, Like, etc) into its algorithm. At
the scale with which Google operates, human intervention must be kept to a
minimum. As we saw with Alex Diaz’s critique of PageRank, however, simply
saying you use an algorithm doesn’t mean the results are void of values and
judgments. It simply means those values and judgments are encoded
mathematically.