>> and now siva vaidhanathan contends that because google is the sole search engine for many internet users, the company is able to control what is greatest interest and value on the web presenting a single review of what is available to the user. the author argues for changes in the ways that people sword and receive information on line. mr. siva vaidhanathan presents his arguments at the harvard university bookstore in cambridge massachusetts for a little over an hour. ..

>> one company would serve as the lens through which we view the world in so many ways, so many times a day. i'm not sure, at least i wasn't sure at the beginning, that we should complain about this situation. after all, we invited it, we celebrate it, we relish it, and we do it, right? we google all the time. and so, um, i tried to enter this project with that sense of weirdness first and foremost. i wanted to, i wanted to, um, constantly remind myself and remind my readers that this was not the natural state of things. things could have gone very differently. so go back to when google was a newborn. you probably had not even heard of it in its first year, 1998, when it first rolled out for public use. it was actually hosted by the stanford university servers. you found it at google.stanford.edu. the first few notices that i was

able to find in the popular press refer to it at that url. and even early on it was clear that google was going to be the darling of people who were, um, excited about technology. technologically sophisticated. it accomplished a couple of things that had been eluding a lot of other companies that had been trying to organize the web and help navigate the weapon. first and foremost, it had a blank page, right? it was just a box through which you would enter text and generate a fairly clean selection of links. and the links would be in order, and the order seemed to make sense to us, right? it struck us as intuitively right. intuitively relevant. and the great leap that google made early on was, first of all, to use that blank page and at a time when if you remember the web in the late '90s, and some of you might, the web was crazy. it was full of all kinds of

flashing things and crazy things, and every page looked like, you know, walking down times square in the middle to have fight night. it was just lot of attention-grabbing devices on too many web pages. in addition, the major search engine services of the day -- alta vista, for instance, or yahoo! even which is still with us and, actually, not going anywhere for a while -- those services tended to crowd their pages with content. some of that content they would actually pay to create, others they would pay to harvest from other places. there was no sense that these other portals to the web understood the web. the way that google did, right? the folks who started google understood, first of all, that you and i are perfectly willing to create content that google can then harvest and link to and share with us, and they don't have to pay us, right? amazing insight. the other insight about that blank page was the blank page was trustworthy.

the blank page said i'm not trying to sell you anything, and i'm not trying to take you anywhere you don't want to go at a time when it was clear that many search engines were actually auctioning off the positions of their search results. google made it very clear largely through word of mouth that its search engine results were generated by their algorithms purely, and theiral dwrit ms were at a distance from the immediate interests of the company. in fact, the company had no interests, if you can imagine, until about 2003 the company wasn't even selling advertising, right? it was just running on venture capital money. so for the first four or five years of google's existence, it was there to be great, and it worked. in 1998 it debuts. by the time it's one year old, it's just starting to walk. it was already organizing the web for us.

it was already making it clear to millions of web users that the web didn't have to be a chaotic place, that one could use it to draw a usable map for information, to get from one place to another. well, before search engines were good, before google really reinvented the search engine, one had to find a good starting page and follow a series of good links to other pages, right? and collect that trail. and sometimes try to guide other people through that trail to replicate the same information. and it was maddening, and it was chaotic, and you didn't know if you were missing some good stuff. but most of the time you didn't even find good stuff. you found a lot of scary stuff or weird stuff or inappropriate stuff, and there just was no method to the madness of the web. so google almost immediately sets itself up, almost inadvertently, as the custodian of the web. now, over time google did something else very clever. google had to figure out what puts one link above another? be why should one page be more

important than another? and the term that google uses for the criterion upon which can it would rank these links is relevance. which page is more relevant to the search than another page? there are a lot of different ways to do this, right? in the early days of web search, the number of times a search term showed up on a page counted for a lot, right? because if there were a page about the boston red sox, it might say red sox a lot on that page, and and that's a pretty good guess you would think for the importance of that page to that search. problem is, didn't take long before people figured that out, and they would make a page about something completely different and just load it up with invisible text for common search terms, right? is terms that people were using all the time anyway, and that would trick people to going into unrelated pages. pornographers were masters at

this very early. and the fact that pornographers were generally so much smarter than anybody doing anything else on the web, largely because it was the only kind of business making money on the web at the time, the big trick for google as it became the custodian of the web was to figure out how to make the web less offensive, less threatening, more usable, more pleasant. and if it can do that, google figured, eventually -- i'm using google as if it was an actual person or animal which, actually, my 5-year-old daughter says sometimes, she thinks google's a person. she imagines met this person named google and i go to california to meet this person named google, and apparently google invited me to a party one time. i don't know, there's some story she tells her friends. [laughter] so imagine this, you've got the web that in the late '90s was a scary place and many people were not sure how much interaction they wanted with the web. these were the days when it was

hard to convince someone that doing banking was a good idea, and that's probably the end of the list, right? shopping was risky, research was risky, putting your kids down in front of the computer was risky. that sort of activity. it was important for everyone who wanted to make money on the web to make the web a less frightening place. and we didn't even notice this was going on. so google installed some more criteria. instead of using this sort of number of times search terms appear on the page, google decided there's avertive affirmation, and it's called the hyperlink. if there are people creating web pages around the world and they happen to be interested in the boston red sox and they start creating web links to what they consider an authoritative page about information concerning the boston red sox, it may be the team's actual page, it may be a fan page, espn's page, but they're going to start creating links saying these are the pages to look toward.

they don't spell out those words, but by creating hyperlink, it was affirmation. google's founders wrote a paper when they were in graduate school that, basically, made it so that a page's relevance would be scored by the number of votes it gets from around the internet. and then they waited that -- weighted that because if espn starts pointing to somebody's homemade page about the red sox, that's a powerful vote of affirmation. or if "wall street journal" web page links to somebody's financial advice blog -- there weren't actually blogs at the time -- but you can imagine that counts for a lot. that's a major sense of affirmation within that field. so those votes are weighted more if i put up a link to somebody's page on my blog, for instance, right? so that was major insight number one. major insight number two was that you can start scoring the results based on the quality of the page. and this happens a little bit

later in google's history. it actually happens in the last couple of years. google starts saying there's certain design elements of a page that work better for us, and we think work better for our users, our readers, and those are often expressed graphically and not just textually. so it's not hard to imagine that pages that are trying to trick you into falling into the pornography world are going to be full of lots of extra video, links that go into strange places, lots of extraneous code, what they call malware, you know, little programs that embed themselves in your browser and, ultimately, your operating system and potentially corrupt your computer. the bad people in the world are going to load up the pages with lots of nasty stuff, and google has an interest, again, in making the web usable, trustworthy and. pleasant. they have a way of using key

words that relate honestly to the subject of the page. and, of course, have these votes of affirmation. and so within a very shot period of time the -- short period of time the web becomes a trustworthy place and lo and behold, this and can the widespread use of encryption you get people actually shopping and banking on the web. ultimately, the better it is for google because google's a starting place. instead of having to follow links, you go back to this central place, and it gives you a menu of places to dive into. so you're no longer actually using it in a webby way, you're plumbing for depth. so that's the nice story. but, again, google's 12 years old. it's adolescent. its voice is just starting to change. by 2004 when google's merely six, it started, remarkably, expanding its areas of interest. and about that time i started really taking notice. i had used google from, jeez, from '99, from the time i first

heard from some very tech-savvy friends that this was the search engine to trust. around 2004 google started launching a number of other projects, and we're all familiar with what those projects became. projects like google news, projects gibe g mail and the -- like gmail and scanning millions of books from dozens of books from around the world, it starts with five, including universities and then moves on to many others. and this project kind of blew my mind, right? so in you're i start reading about this project t scanning millions of books, and i start seeing this amazing hyperbole coming from people who are working for universities and university libraries, from people who are big fans of google and from people who just want knowledge to spread. and they start saying what an amazing thing that this big, powerful company is going to spread knowledge to every corner of the world pretty much for free, and i start read things

from -- in the all sorts of corners basically saying this is going to create a new library that anyone can go into. and i'm sitting back there saying, you know google's six years old, right? google at that point was around for less time than brad pitt and jennifer aniston had been married, and look how well that turned out. so i said why is a university, like the university of michigan or harvard or stanford university asking a 6-year-old company to be the custodian of this immense amount of wealth and knowledge? this isn't end well, is basically what i thought. it might start beautifully, but this was obviously a controversial proposal when it came to copyright. the publishers and authors whose work was being scanned in raised lawsuits, and the lawsuits were settle inside a way that made it very clear several years down the line that google never really intended to make a library, it end intended to make a bookstore.

and i love bookstores. there's nothing wrong with a bookstore, but i'm not too pleased with a bookstore that tries to pretend it's a library. from about 2004 i started seeing that google's real corporate mission statement which is, believe it or not, to organize the world's information and make it universeally accessible is actually kind of scary. you know, i was born in the 20th century, i lived for about, you know, 40% of the 20th century, and i know enough to know that when somebody makes a big, grand statement like that, you need to step back and beware, right? because the 20th century involved a lot of big, grand statements that didn't turn out so well either. not anything close to chaos and nastiness and horrible tragedy that would come from anything google is doing, but nonetheless i thought what an odd thing, what a strange way to run a company. to say that the goal of the company is to organize the world's information and make it universeally accessible. i knew enough about the web, my

job is actually to study the web, so i knew enough about the weapon to know that they're organizing the web. they're not organizing the world's information, and the web is not the world. it wasn't then, it didn't now, right? -- it isn't now. because what's valuable or important on the web is a refraction of what's real in the world. and you can do this by doing a basic google search for a subject you know a lot about. you will see pages that you might not think of as the most authoritative, but they are the most relevant according to the standards that google brings, the best designed pages with the most links to them. but the web is merely an abstraction of the sort of thought that many people on this earth actually with engage in every day. but think of the number of people who don't engage with the web yet, think of the ways we engage with each other and with information and it doesn't actually get accurately reflected on the web. it's really important to remember that google it has value judgments and biases built into its algorithm ms that distill their results in a

particular way. and there's nothing wrong with that. it actually is so much better than the absence of that, it's so much better than what anybody else has thought of, but it's not the world, and it's not the world's information. and i'm enough of a pragmatist and enough of a pluralist to think no one institution and no one company should actually have that job of organizing the world's information and making it universeally accessible. the mission statement of harvard university isn't that audacious, right? if you can imagine harvard not being awe days,, right? i'm sure the mission of harvard university actually reads something like to educate the young men of new england to be clergy or something. [laughter] that's what it originally was meant to do. but really, that's a stunning mission statement. now, we're probably all more familiar with its informal motto which is don't be evil. and i started thinking what that means because every time google does something that causes friction in the world, it sends its cars through the streets of europe taking pictures of people

without their permission. and in europe people are pretty sensitive about anybody taking their picture and putting it in a sensitive databases. they didn't call them a databases in the '30s and '40s, but they had bad experiences about people keeping too much information in centralized places and pulling people out of their houses and sending them off on trains. there's a little sensitivity in europe, we don't necessarily have that kind of level of concern here in this country. we're a lot more trustworthy if, of nothing else, the private sector and major corporations. there's been a lot of conflict, tension and stress in europe and friction over these sorts of things. in the united states, of course, we've had a lot of friction and controversy about youtube, about things that show up on youtube and a lot of friction and controversy about the google book program, right? and understanding that every time that google is confronted with a situation which somebody

is upset and somebody calls for some sort of intervention or regulation, google's basic defense is, trust us, we treat you well, we've always treated you well. we have this internal ethic, this internal motto of don't be evil. they actually don't say those words out loud. like, the ceo of google, eric schmidt, who's about to step down, to my knowledge, has never stood up in if front of an audience and said we believe not -- we believe the motto, don't be evil. i've never heard him say that, but it's embedded in many things he does say and many other officials at google say things that sound like a declaration of corporate/social responsibility. so i started asking that question, why do we fall for that every time, first of all? secondly, why do we think that a company that had, that is basically 12 years old is going to be like anything like it currently is in the next 20 years? why would we think that future performances in the any way

predicted by past performance? because it isn't, of course. conditions change, companies change, economies change, politics change, and we do know that in the world of new media or the world of digital communication or the markets dealing with the internet that nobody's king for very long, right? because when google started, everyone was concerned that microsoft would be calling all the shots in our information ecosystem. i bought that, i thought that was true, right? things shifted over time. now google is the one we worry about. now we're started to worry about facebook, in fact, google's worried about facebook in terms of competition and for advertising dollars and our attention. so as i started stringing together these concerns, i thought it's really important that i come up with a way to sort of distill what google means to us and what we mean to google. other really great writers had gotten inside of google, had traveled on the plane with the big guys that run google, had told the story of the company,

had written a biography of the company. and other people had written lots of books about how we could all learn from google or other companies can learn from google and make a lot of money. i couldn't write books like that, and other good writers had already done that. my contribution, i hoped as i started this book, was to delve into our relationship with google. what does google mean to us, and what do we mean to google? what is the nature of the transaction? why does google do all this for me, right? why do they spend so many billions of dollars on services that help me make my life better, and they don't ask for my money from if me? what's going on there? i mean, we should be a little suspicious of that. so what is the nature of the transaction? what am i giving google? the obvious answer once you think about it for five minutes is i'm not actually google's customer, and neither are you, right? i'm comcast's customer, so i get mad at them all the time. something doesn't work or my bill's too high, i know i'm

comcast's customer. i'm google's product. i am what google sells to advertisers. that's nothing new, right? i'm nbc's product every sunday when i watch the nfl, right? nbc's selling my attention to beer companies and car companies. so it's not a new model. but i think we forget it because of the depth of interaction. and immersion in google. we consider google to be a part of our lives, embedded in our lives. google keeps very good track of our intentions and our desires and our fetishes and obsessions. and focuses the results of our searches to reflect what we've already told google we really, really like thinking about. now, that has some interesting implications. and google is changing, right? so i described earlier the ways that google mastered the web, figured out a great, efficient and effective way to help us

navigate the web. right? some brilliant ideas about counting these links, weighting these links properly. so in if recent years, in the last two years, google's added yet another layer of standards or criteria. and what they're really focusing on now is what they call the user experience. they want our experience with google to be really satisfying, deeply satisfying and more fun than it has been before, more satisfying in a social way, more satisfying in an intellectual way, more satisfying, most important, in a commercial way. so they are taking, they're taking the record of our expressions and desires that we enter in the little box, right? it's the confessional. we confess to google, right? what we really want or what we really did or what we shouldn't have done and we were thinking about and we probably shouldn't be thinking about. we put all that in a google box, we get results, ghoog l makes a note. it doesn't necessarily associate that text you put into the box

with you as a person. it doesn't care about your name or social security number, but in terms of where you're sitting when you're doing that, so it knows generally in the world where you are, and it can associate your set of inquiries with others who sit in the same general area. it might also over time if you happen to have an with google, build up a pretty rich set of indicators of the sorts of cars you like, the sorts of shoes you like, the sorts of books you like. kind of like how facebook does it just because we tell facebook all this stuff, right? hey, facebook, i like this music. and, of course, facebook's job is to take all that data and associate ads in the column to try to sell us stuff. well, qoog l's -- google's trying to do the same sort of thing with the record of intentions that we give google. and, again, t not anything that's easily exploit bl as far as we know, it's not easily attach bl to our name and social security and address as far as we know. it does know our location in many places, especially if you

have a google phone, an android phone. google knows where you are almost all the time, right? there's a gp schip in there. -- gps chip in there. so with all of this data google is increasingly focusing the results on you. customizing the results and localizing the results. so you're not likely to come up with a result that is distant from you or is sort of out of character or out of place or out of the field through which you usually explore. that has some pretty amazing implications. first of all, that's really great. think of the time they're saving us, right? i think a lot about a particular sports team or a car, maybe i have a car that breaks down a lot, and i do a lot of searches for parts and repairs. well, google's going to help me save time so i'm not clicking too much. it's going to keep giving me results that reflect those sorts of areas, right?

google will eventually understand i do a lot of searches for that brand of car. that's really great for shopping, for buying. it's not so great for learning. if we want an information ecosystem that actually serves us well as curious people, as citizens, as people who are trying to navigate the world and make sense of the world, as people who are trying to figure out what these symptom thes mean, as people who are trying to figure out what's going on with climate change, as people who are trying to figure out what's going on with health care reform, we might actually be better off not having focused information. we might be were better off comg across a set of results that surprise us or challenge us, a set of results that don't reinforce where we already were and where we already are. we might be better off coming up with a set of results that aren't particularly geared toward consumption. and we're better off coming up with a set of results that aren't a mixture of ways to help us consume and ways to help us learn.

now, for a dozen years we've gotten very lucky. google has served both of these interests remarkably well. think of all the times google has helped you answer a really important question. and, of course, if you are in any way doubtful or critical of google, you probably went to a second source. you might have called the librarian, you might have called someone who's written a book on the subject, you might have called a doctor, right? you might have quit on the second -- clicked on the second page of results. all of these are very healthy techniques, and another reason i wrote book is i wanted people to learn how to use google in a better way. i use google dozens of times a day. i used google to find my way to this store. i'm not in the any way going to advocate that we not use google, but i am going to advocate we use it in a wiser way. i want us all to understand that google has biases and limitations baked into its

algorithms, that google is a publicly-traded company that must satisfy the desires of its shareholders to enhance value, that is its job number one. and it's been so good at that, it's been so wealthy that it can afford to be good. and so it has for the most part. and even when it's bad, it thinks it's being good which is part of the problem. but with all that we could be better, right? the real problem is with us. the real problem is we are so addicted to the speed and convenience of that lovely set of results that comes in a nice set of ten with a value attaches to each. -- attached to each. and we trust it so much that almost nobody clicks past result number three on the first page of results, let alone click to the second page, that's absurd, right? in fact, next time you do a google search, please, click to the second page just to see what's there. you never know, right? we've seen academic and industry

studies that show people do not even question the judgment that google makes. people do not question the judgment to the point of clicking on results four, five or six. it's one, two or three. and, actually, if a lot of people start clicking on two, it soon becomes number one. so with all that i think it's incumbent upon us to mix it up a little bit, right? to bring a little bit of diversity into our ecosystem. to make sure that while we want google to keep getting better and serving us well in a way that all we're really giving it is this list of our desires, and that's not that bad a price to pay considering the value it's brought to our lives, but let's do it in a wiser way. let's understand what the real risks and costs are, let's understand that we actually have the power to manipulate what google learns about us and how it follows us, and you can actually do that. it takes about seven clicks. most people don't want to make those seven clicks, right?

on google you really can customize what information you give google to a large degree. there's a cost to that, and that's another important thing we need to learn about google. if you customize the way google tracks you, and if you limit the amount of information and the kind of information google follows about you, you degrade the service that google gives you, and it's a real obvious trade-off once you start clicking on those things. you start seeing that google no longer helps you shop as well, but it might help you learn a little better and challenge you a little bit. so as it becomes better for shopping and worse for learning, that raises, i think, a really important question for us as citizens. as citizens of the country and of the world. because i happen to think there's more to life than shopping, although not today. please shop. [laughter] after you get out of here, maybe you don't have to shop so much. when you think about the extent to which we depend on this medium of the worldwide web to learn about the world, maybe we need to imagine different systems.

maybe we need to invest more in systems like public libraries and university libraries and their outreaches to other communities. maybe we have to imagine that we can build a system, and it might take 50 years, build a system that can equalize the maldistribution of information across the world to the point where -- and i don't think this is impossible -- that a child growing up in south africa has no disadvantage compare today a child growing up in sweden when it comes to access to information. we have the tools to make that happen right now. we might have the political will to make it happen right now. we haven't even tested it. and the reason we haven't tested it is that google's been too good to us, right? we've, we've been going on believing that cotton candy is real food. and google keeps feeding us great services that simulate this democratization of information, and google, of course, is sincere that it would like the number of web users in the world to increase exponentially. it would love, google would love as much as i would love for

every 12-year-old to have access to information, and it's pouring money into such projects, and that's beautiful. but we should not rely on this 12-year-old company to guide that effort because over time there are going to be hard choices to the make in terms of policy, hard choices to make in terms of technology, hard choices to make in terms of practice. so as a citizen i think it's imperative that we start asking questions about whether we want google to handle all of our shopping and all of our learning needs. and if we don't and if we'll recognize that google in 20 years is almost certain to be a very different company, maybe even owned at that time by somebody completely different like the, um, reincarnated head of rupert murdoch, right? who knows what's going to happen. but at that point google won't be the google we grew up with. the mature google is going to have different pressures, it's going to have different -- who's going to know what the worldwide web is going to be in 20 years

ago, right? as we move more of our information-seeking habits and shopping-seeking habits to lock down, close devices that aren't really on the web, and the more time we spend in the gated community of facebook as opposed to the open web, the less money google's going to make in the long term unless it can keep expanding its market. so this is an interesting battle going on. google wants people to be comfortable with the web, as i said in the beginning, and it's doing everything it can to keep the internet open and free because that's good for google. it happens to be good for us, which is nice, but over time not everything that's good for google will be good for us, and we have to be prepared for that divergence. and at those moments we're going to have to ask, are there things that we want to preserve and extend and build that google should not do for us or could not do for us? and under those conditions we might want to decide to take some other route. crazy as it may seem, the route we might want to take is the

old-fashioned public library. we might want to invest more in its presence, in its power, in its expansion because that is a reasonable citizen-driven good old-fashioned republican with a small r institution. and it's there to help us as citizens, and it's there to help us as information seekers, as learners, as students and teachers. and we take it for granted because it works so well, and we make this sort of false conclusion that google sends information to us so efficiently that we need the public library less. but, in fact, americans these days use the public library more than ever. americans these days are visiting public libraries in record numbers. the americans who happen to be visiting libraries in record numbers don't subscribe to broadband access at home. in fact, they can't write a check to come past for broadband access at home, and that's what we have to remember because our goal as citizens should be for

maximum empowerment of all citizens. our goal as consumers should be to get the best prices and, again, that's such a different way of being in the world, and i think it's time we started taking both roles seriously instead of just one. thank you very much, and i'd love to have questions. [applause] yes, sir. >> i'm blown away off my feet at what a pro-google presentation this is -- [laughter] and the only thing that we should worry is that google isn't doing it good enough. i'm concerned about the search traces that google collects about individuals. what happens if we want to learn about something bad or something i'm afraid of or about some threat i read about or some bad person or gambling, and google will accumulate that and surely you know about the incidents a few years ago where aol published search traces, supposedly anonymously, and some woman in connecticut was fingered right down to her

social security number. and given the wikileaks debacle which is gripping the politics of the middle east, the preservation of security of these traces the going to go away the first time some critical need says you have to release that or some julian assange to pay -- >> so a couple things to remember about this very case. now, everything we do in the electronic environment is traceable by somebody, and google may actually be low on the list of potential problems here. and i say that because, first of all, google has done what it could do under our laws to keep federal investigators away from fishing expeditions in their data. unfortunately, for us and for google our laws are on the side of the government, right? so that's the problem with our government and not for google. and i think this is a really important part of this, right?

we've become so dependent on companies behaving well, right? we've become so dependent on us demanding that the companies we use in our lives, um, treat us well and are possible is that -- responsible that we forget that sometimes it's not up to them. the fact is our leaders wrote some really bad laws that not only give investigators way too much power that has no real oversight and accountability embedded in the it and that didn't happen too long ago, and it doesn't seem to be changing for the better in recent months either. but on top of that google is not the only private company in the chain, right? comcast and at&t and verizon and time warner are all part of the surveillance system. and they keep rich data on what we do as well. in fact, if you work for a university, the university keeps logs of much of what you do as well. um, and sometimes they purge the logs, and sometimes they don't.

sometimes they anonymize the logs, sometimes they don't. but right now the government's on a big effort to get internet service providers to cease purging and anonymizing the logs. they want a record of who logged on where -- when from where and did what. so those companies actually don't want to be a part of that. they don't want the responsibility, they don't want the expense, to be the custodian of that kind of information. so it's not like they're defending our interests, they're defending their own interests, it just so happens most of those companies would rather be on our side than the government's side but not out of love. it's actually out of concern for just having too much of a hassle, an expensive hassle. nonetheless, we're losing, and those companies are losing. so you're absolutely right to be concerned about the fact that any of us could get snagged in some sort of fishing expedition for data. it's too easy to come up with false positives in these data

analysis games, and we've already seen the case of a number of innocent people dragged into bad situations. took years to expri candidate themselves because they happened to have the wrong data points in a system. that's a much bigger problem. i'm not ready to write that book. i'm not qualified must have to write that book. now -- i'm not west virginiad enough to write that book. i'm not anti-google, but i'm against our own faith-based embrace of google in all things. and that's why i think there will be times when we might want to, in fact, i do want to invoke the power of the state to restrict the amount of information that these companies can hold about us and the manner in the which they hold it about us. i think that's very important, and it's going to be more important every day. now, that's an argument we need to have, and it has to occur at a better level than trust us, we're google, we've never done you wrong, right? that's really where i'm coming down. like, i just think we need to be more responsible citizens, more

engaged citizens and users. and we do want to use the power that people have which at times actually involves the state, um, to take care of our interests. we had a question in the back. >> >> tell us about the google scholar. >> yeah. google scholar starts around 2005, 2006, and it was a neat idea that came out of this policy that google has inside where they let employees send one day a week, 20% of their time, working on projects that don't serve the bottom line of google. that are not about their prime project. and a couple of folks at google decides there's all this scholarly literature that east really helpful and might be really valuable to people outside of the scholarly environment, right? i get access to this amazing collection of information by virtue of working for a university, but if you don't work for a university, you don't go to a university, you're out of luck because you don't even know it's there. of a standard web search doesn't bring this up.

they got permission from all these publishers to come through and let google index their information to present these assets to these articles. now, of course, if you've used it, you know if you're not in a university environment, you generally have to pay for the article, but at least you can find the article. i think that's a super thing up to a point. the problem again is how they do it, right? how they do the search system for one thing. because their bias is built into that search engine. scholarly articles don't link to each other. if i read one, as i have, and my friend jonathan here who's another professor writes a scholarly article, even if we cite each other in the footnotes, there's no electronic link, right? there's no hyperlink like on the web. and that hyperlink is the magic thing that google follows. so what is it that makes google crank one result over another -- rank one result over another in google scholar?

nobody really knows, and i've used it enough to know it's not dependable. you lose a lot of stuff, and, again, just like with web search, if you do the same search a week later, you get different results. the instability of it is maddening. if you do an exact title search or author search in google scholar, you generally find what you want. but if you're just grazing around in a subject area, it's maddening. i mean, again, better than nothing, poorly designed. and because it doesn't make google any money, they're not likely to make it better. they don't need to, it's good enough. so i tell my students -- especially graduate students -- starting with google scholar's fine but do not stop there. there are going to be a lot of articles that google scholar does not show you, and the only way to do that is to walk through the professionally-built indexes available through the library. but, again, you have to be affiliated with the university to get that level of access. and that's a shame. i think that should be on the agenda of what i call the human knowledge project, this 50-year plan to give everyone in the

world decent access to decent information. yes, sir. >> aye got a couple questions, but i just want to make a comment about what you said about government getting access to people's browsing habits and whatever. i thought at this point -- not really dead sure, but i thought from what identify read is that -- i've read is that the federal government has a subpoena control or requests on web server laws? that was a pretty standard situation at this point. >> subpoena would be great. a judge issues a subpoena. what happens right now is the fbi can use national security letters to wrench out information. >> right. >> and that requires no oversight at all. that's just an agent saying i want to do this. and it has not only the power to compel someone like a bookstore, for instance, to hand over records of what people have purchased, but it also has deniability built in so that the subject of that security letter is not allowed to, i'm sorry,

that the firm that's handed that security letter's not allowed to tell the subject of the investigation of it existence. so you don't get to defend yourself if you're being investigated. >> okay. now, is this part of the patriot act as far as -- >> yes, and no. part of it is part of the patriot act, but there are other elements that come from earlier laws from the clinton years. and, basically, what we have now is a system in which if you're a really bad person doing really bad things, you don't have to worry about any of this powerful investigative power because you're going to use strong encryption, and you're going to use it in a really smart way. so the really bad people in the world are totally escaping from this surveillance state. it's just the dumb people, right? the people who -- and you've read about them, they got arrested for being really dumb and coming up with plans that were never going to work because they were too dumb to use encryption, and they met in public places, and they used e-mail, and they get busted.

but we have a really absurd situation where bad people who want to do really bad things are, basically, outside the power of the law. so the fbi, which has to show that it's doing something, ends up snagging people who perhaps aren't that dangerous. >> well, i think thinking one of the browsing patterns, the tracking patterns where if people would go in search of information, another question sending -- well, there's also the problem, you know, interceptioning their messages and reading them, that kind of thing as you're talking about with encryption. but as far as, you know, as tracking patterns of anyone which are maintained in the server logs, so it's a question where are the people going to go with their browsers, what information they're accessing, what stuff they're getting back, what they're doing not necessarily -- well, in addition to what they're actually, the packets are and what the information coming back to them is. but it's a question of their motion patterns on the net.

they're also very concerned about that. >> yeah, certainly. >> if a person wants to go to a web site on afghanistan and kick around in there, it's very important for the cia to know about that. >> it could be. >> i think what's happening right now with some of the isps like at&t and comcast, whoever, you know, the web servers, the towers and whatever they're fighting, i think, the federal government accessing to those, the web serve servers themselves in the isp, like, farms. a very contemporary legal issue at this point. >> sure. but again, all of this goes above and beyond the search service which is what i concerned myself with. i mean, i think there's a much larger challenge both in terms of enhancing security and enhancing justice. and i don't think we're serving either of those goals well with the current system. but, again, that's another book that i haven't written, and it's probably not the subject that i should be addressing right out

here on c-span. so, um, yes. >> couple of questions. i wasn't, um, you talk about google being a young company, an adolescent. you talk about its life span in human terms which doesn't seem terribly accurate. i mean, a restaurant that's 12 years old is a very old restaurant, really, a very mature one, and especially given your comment about how fast business changes, i don't know, it seems slightly disingenuous to me to compare it to a 12-year-old human being, was one comment. so i was wondering if you'd comment in company terms -- >> sure. in company years. >> where does it really go there, and, again, is that even, you know, the length of its life even a relevant issue? >> i think you're absolutely right. and in internet company years it's actually quite old, right? it's actually quite established. but that speaks to my point, i think n a stronger way than my cute way of expressing it earlier.

and by that i mean that because internet time is so compressed, 12 years is a time that demonstrates its power and success, right? it speaks well to its ability to thrive, and you could actually look at its balance sheets and returns and quarterly reports to see that as well. that said, we know that the environment shifts so quickly and the nature of companies shifts so quickly and internet company years are so compressed that we, for that reason we can't expect it at 20 to resemble what it is at 12 or, perhaps, even to expect it to be around at 20, right? i mean, general motors has been around for about 75 years, and that's pretty impressive, but it's not what it was, and it almost wasn't a year ago, right? so that's a long company, but that's an industry that's heavy, that builds things that lasts, an industry that basically bought off the government and made sure it had tremendous subsidies to make it happen at every point, not just late hi.

that's a different game. that industry has a different time compression factor than internet industries. you're right, i wanted to compare it to the older institutions with deep roots that are, ultimately, i think, the proper custodians of our information ecosystem. libraries and universities. and not just, not limited to libraries and universities, but this sense of our collective culture, right? this notion that i think we should have a diversity of interests, and we should accept the gathered wisdom of these institutions and the people who work there and not just be dazzled by the new. that was really my point. yes, sir. >> as someone who's watched google spread through higher education, i'm curious what you see as the biggest danger or threat that it poses in that particular environment. >> yeah. biggest danger is it's cheap or free, you know? [laughter] and universities right now are under such pressure to do whatever they can for almost nothing. so most universities i know of

are now considering, if they haven't already shifted their e-mail hosting to google, letting google host their e-mails. and that, at least with students, if not for staff and faculty. and what's going on with that is, basically, google gets a customer for life. in if a student graduates and wants to keep that e-mail consistent because he or she already has lot of job search information on that e-mail, that person's going to remain a google person through e-mail. so it's a nice trick for them, right? but nothing really sleazy about it. the danger is, of course, that universities are supposed to keep the highest level of privacy respect for their students. and that's come promused -- compromised once you shift important information to a third party. and i'm not convinced that in that instance and in instances where, um, professors are being urged to use google documents service in classes and as part of course ware, in those cases

i'm not convinced universities are looking out for the best interests of students in all cases. they're going for the cheap and easy and not building in proper safeguards because there's almost no reason to negotiability with someone who's giving you something for free n. the real world, someone's trying to give you something for free out on the street, you should be wary. but that's really not how it's working -- >> danger, though, just following up on that. >> all right, sure. any record of a student's grades, a paper that's been graded or recommendation letters that i happen to write for a student are not supposed to be distributed beyond the authorized recipient. so if i write a recommendation letter in which i will often say how a student performed in my class, only the recipient of that with the student's permission is allowed to read it. and the student has to waive the right to read it him or herself actually. legally, according to federal law. and any grade report can only be shared with a student: i can't even tell students what a grade

is, which drives parents crazy. and that's really important because you never really know who you're dealing with on the other side of the phone. so respecting that sort of relationship and treating students as adults, um, is a really important part of the culture of you are institutions and an -- of our institutions, and i'm afraid we're letting that slip in a lot of different ways. when we invite facebook and youtube into the classroom as we're encouraged to do increasingly, we run a lot of risks, and i don't think we've thought it all through. >> you were talking about you don't really want to touch upon the ideas, like, as the description how the fbi gets their information is kind of weak, but other than, you know, just using the library and ore sources -- other sources besides google, how can we manipulate it without just stop using it? >> yeah. well, you can go to the privacy settings, but when you do that, you do limit the functionality of a lot of it services. the other thing is just know, if you're aware that everything you type into google's search box is

used in some way either by associating it with you in some way or collectively as part of your community, then you might actually be a little bit careful about how you construct a search. you might want to turn off the ability for google to follow you for certain searches and turn it back on when you're doing innocent searches or searches that might not be misconstrued. if there were clever ways to use google, the problem is the defaults are always set for maximum vacuuming of the information, right? so google wants you to be already comfortable and unsuspicious and, therefore, willing to give it everything to be used in every way and shared as widely as possible. the default is always maximum. it's up to us, unfortunately, to train ourselves, to be wary, to be careful, to worry and then take action. i think this is the wrong way to have a system, and i think our

laws actually made it so the companies had to convince us to turn on the spigot, right? so the companies had to say, by the way, if you let us collect the following information, we will give you a better service, and this is exactly what it will be. that's an honest transaction. but to have the default on maximum and have us how to guess what we should set it to, that's not very honest. so for a company that proclaims to be responsible, i think fundamentally its deal with us is dishonest. >> time for one or two more questions. >> okay. yes? >> >> wonld wondering if you could comment on how google responds to and reacts to its competitors. i work at a publishing company, so how it interacts with amazon and apple is of particular interest to me. last week they or two weeks ago apple comes out and announces they'll have magazines and charge publishers 30%, the next day google says we'll do the same thing for 10%. how are they responding to the marketplace? >> yeah. google has so many competitors

in so many areas. google, now, is a mobile phone company, so nokia is a competitor, and so is apple. and so is blackberry, right? that's one market in which it has intense competition. in the area of publishing, now, google is involved, as i said, it's built a bookstore, but it's also trying to offer sales and access to electronic versions of periodicals through the same system, and those deals they negotiate with vendors and with publishers are real thorny. i'm actually a huge fan of what google's doing in the publishing area. i'm not a big fan of what they're doing with the library content, but i'm actually not that upset about google. i'm upset that the university libraries are suckers and went for this deal without protecting our interests. if google wants to do this and create cool things and make money with it, i have no problem with it. but what google's doing in publishing both with periodicals

and with books is really undermining the powerful position that amazon's been in for a number of years, right? amazon is the problem in the publishing industry, and believe me, if i thought i could sell even one book, i'd write a book about amazon, but amazon would make sure i'd never sell the book. [laughter] actually, i'm sure amazon doesn't care what the books inside sell, they just want to sell items. and that's actually part of the problem. they're good and efficient at selling widgets at a cheap price and by considering every book to be a commodity rather than a discreet cultural item, they do great harm to people who write books for a living and people who sell books for a living livd people who publish books for a living. at the same time, for people who read it's a great deal. it just so happens that we subsidize, we have huge government subsidies for amazon because if you buy my book in this store, you have to pay sales tax, and if you buy it on

amazon, you don't have to pay sales tax. oh, i didn't say that. we have government policies that make amazon richer and challenge stores like this, and that's a shame, and that shouldn't happen. but it is the case. amazon has, had a heavy hand in all it negotiations with publishers. it's been dictating the terms in terms of the percentage that publishers get, the royalties that authors get in some cases, and it's been trying to force down the price of electronic weeks to this commodity level of $9.99. and by doing that it doesn't respect the fact that publishing is not that simple. every book is not going to yield a return if it's priced at 3.99 -- 9.99, and if consumers consider every book whether it's 100 pages or 400 pages to be worth 9.99, then you're going to have a real tough time selling books that we know can't sell more than 500 or a thousand copies, that we know are likely to fail and only sell a few thousand companies when the publisher thought it would sell

50,000 copies. for books like that, it's important to recover the money sunken into the production process, but anson wants to treat -- amazon wants to treat all books like a commodity. what's happened with pet to haves like -- pet to haves doing electronic bookstores and a lot of independent publishers contributing electronic back bon new and interesting ways as well, um, you have now more players who are able to work with publishers in gentler and more competitive ways. and so publishers now have the ability although it rarely happens to say no to amazon. and that wasn't the case for, um, before about seven or eight months ago or a year ago to say no to amazon in terms of book distribution, because electronic book distribution was death. but now there are enough competitors out there, and google is a big reason why.

a lot of people are thrilled that google's involved in this because google's not out to cash in on -- in a big way. it's always a side project. so google's role with newspapers, its role with magazines over time, i think, will be beneficial. at least that's how it looks today, to all of those industries. and i'm really happy to see them deal in a less coercive way with, see google deal in a less coerce sieve way with publishers because if it were just amazon, we'd all be in trouble. yes. >> um, i'm just interested, when you were talking about everybody going to google, and i noticed that certainly with microsoft in two areas the slowly being incrementally encroaching upon google's control, and i was wondering if people are just becoming more aware or separating their searches so that google doesn't have their

whole history or -- and, also, the battle not only with higher education, but there's the battleground in the cloud for k-12 information. >> yes. >> so it's starting when they're little ones, the digital native. so if you could comment on that. >> well, in terms of being -- and competition. so in the united states google has, um, for the last couple of years had about 70% of the search activity. and that number hasn't necessarily changed even as bing has gone up because most of the new users is taking from are yahoo! which is actually a partner in bing. so in some ways it's a zero sum there. it is taking some of the searches away from google a little bit, but google also is growing. and google is growing not so much in the u.s., but it's growing tremendously across the world. so, for instance, in western europe google is more than 90% of the share of searches in most western european countries. in places like the netherlands and portugal, it's more than