Last weekend, the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht hosted the „Forum on Quaero“. Described as a „public think tank on the politics of the search engine“, the idea was to discuss the concept of a public search engine from a variety of perspectives. In spite of the forum’s name, Quaero itself, the French public initiative for the development of search engine technology, was largely absent from the discussions. Nevertheless, the range of input from fields such as art, media theory, politics, law, design and computer science made for an interesting and productive weekend.
Michael Zimmer started off by discussing the problem of privacy and search engines. He saw a unique chance in the Quaero initiative to build a search engine based on value-conscious design from the ground up. Seen in the context of current developments in the commercial search engine world, his eight demands to the Quaero developers were quite radical:
- Quaero must be designed in such a way as to prevent any substantive response to a civil or criminal subpoena of user activity
- Quaero must be designed so IP addresses and cookies cannot be associated with particular users or accounts
- Query traffic must be encrypted to prevent ‘man in the middle’ monitoring
- Quaero must provide transparency in the data it collects about users, how it is used, who uses it, and how long it is retained
- Quaero must not engage in personalized or behaviorally-targeted advertising
- Quaero must take steps to remove or obscure personally-identifiable images (faces, license plates, etc) from its searchable index
- Quaero must provide individuals the ability to remove or obscure personally-identifiable data from its searchable index
- Quaero must provide users the ability to view, edit, and delete any search history data associated with their account
It would be interesting to hear what the publicly funded European search initiatives have to say about these demands. Maybe their meeting in Geneva next week will shed some light on these issues (but then again, probably not).
Several speakers presented interesting experiments with search engine technology and design. Florian Cramer mentioned an automatic misspelling generator that can be used to circumvent censorships in Google results. Tsila Hassine presented the Google randomiser Shmoogle and the Image Tracer, which displays the changing results of image searches over a period of time. Metahaven dug a little deeper into the question of interface design and showed a prototype of a layered 3D interface that reflects the grade of isolation within the search results. And Richard Rogers presented insight into the reporting on climate change based on a range of tools that were developed at the govcom.org Foundation.
Richard Rogers also discussed the case of the website 911truth.org, which in mid-September disappeared from the Google results for the search „911“ after holding one of the top positions for years (Documentation here). The fact that it is impossible to confirm whether the disappearance is a results of manual censorship or some form of „violation“ of Google’s „quality guidelines“ hardly makes it less disturbing. Rather, these behind-the-scenes decisions are one of the most problematic aspects of the current search environment, where access to information is largely controlled by a single commercial actor.
Reflecting on this problematic concentration of control, a lot of discussions at the forum centred on the development of peer-to-peer search technology. An open and distributed way of crawling, indexing and ranking information surely is a fascinating vision. However, up until now, the technological problems seem to outweigh the possibilities. Ways to deal with spam need to be found, interfaces to involve users in the ranking have to be developed and, most difficult of all, people have to be persuaded to abandon Google for an, as yet, far from perfect search solution.
Jodie Dean presented an interesting comparison between blogs and search engines. From a psychoanalytical perspective, she interpreted both phenomena as an answer to anxieties associated with a chaotic and unstructured information space. Based on algorithmic ranking, search engines promise an objective ordering of this space and introduce an element of purity and immaculacy. Blogs, on the other hand, act as guides in the information space by presenting a strictly individual view. Dean portrays them as “technologies for managing distributed subjectivities”. It was interesting for me to be confronted with such a strongly advanced connection between search and psychoanalysis, since I struggled to get these parts together for a long time in my attempts to adapt film studies’ concept of the dispositif to search engines. I finally gave up that line of thought since I felt I lacked the basis for portraying these needs and anxieties as anthropological constants. On the other hand, I always felt intrigued by Hartmut Winklers early connection between the “royal overlooking position“ provided by search engines and „the specific impetus of blindness that determines our handling of these engines“. Maybe it’s time to pick up these threads again.
In his text, Winkler talks a lot about classification, which also was the topic of Florian Cramers presentation. Taking the famous example of the platypus as his departure point, Cramer declared all attempts at creating universal classification schemes futile; since they can never accommodate everything they aspire to and necessarily introduce arbitrariness in their categorisations. While illustrating his arguments with historical material, Cramer’s real target was the German Theseus initiative, which seeks to develop AI-like tools for “automated logical deduction”. Given the impracticality of manually assembled classification schemes, the goal of automatic ontology generation seems utterly preposterous. Cramer’s answer to the problem of information overload was folksonomies, which according to him, with all their weaknesses reflect the inadequacies of the information space itself. However, after getting home from Maastricht, I made my first excursions into Freebase and I wonder if this isn’t much better than mere tagging: A flexible taxonomy that is able to reflect the needs for changes and re-groupings, but at the same time allows for the (realistic, need-driven) exploitation of semantic connections between the information elements. Combined with CC-licensed content, APIs and all, this seems rather perfect. Will have to look into it some more.
The organisers filmed the whole event, so I hope that the documentation will become available soon, either at www.janvaneyck.nl or at www.metahaven.net
Technorati Tags: Quaero, Theseus, Jan van Eyck Academie, Metahaven, Search Engines, 911truth, Freebase, Open Source, peer-to-peer
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