Google’s Legal Department addresses cutting-edge issues that run from driverless cars to green-energy power cables for the Eastern Seaboard and legal hot spots from China to Turkey. Our legal department today consists of more than 900 legal team members, a significant growth from the one lawyer that made up the legal department in 2001. The unique culture of Google itself has inspired the legal department to innovate in ways that are more progressive than most companies of a similar size. The Google Legal Team supports the vision of the company’s engineers who are trying to create new technologies that will have an international impact on the lives of people. Accordingly, our legal team focuses its support on the interests of the users of the company’s technology and defends Google so that it can continue to focus on the company vision.

Introduction

It may seem a ridiculous thought, but at one point in time it was possible to write a book about internet search and not include any references to Google, though you'd need to go back to the first edition of this book, written at the end of the last century, to find it. The rise of Google has been unstoppable, and it would be quite easy to just write about the search engine and the company behind it for chapter after chapter. A search on Amazon for ‘Google’ results in over 650,000 items for sale (up from 50,000 in 2013) and covers books, apps, videos, mobile phones, hardware and software. Google stopped being just a search engine many years ago, and is now involved in an increasing number of ventures from mobile phones to cloud computing to consumer services and more. It's the world's most dominant search engine, indexes trillions of pages and is searched billions of times every day. In August 2015 Google announced plans to reorganise all of its different interests into an overarching company called Alphabet.

Its success is mirrored by its failures, however. It has tried several times to enter the social networking environ ment to take on Facebook, but each of these attempts has met either with complete failure, with Google Wave and Google Buzz, or very limited success, with Google+. Google glasses failed to take off, despite all of the hype surrounding them. It's also had its fair share of failures in the software field as well, and closes down almost as many projects as reach fruition.

I've called this chapter ‘The world according to Google’ because it's very easy to spend your entire internet working life just using its various products and because of the way in which it tries to ‘mould’ its search results to you it's all too easy to limit what you do and see to these results.

Introduction

While the gift and capitalist economies might seem radically different, in practice capitalist entrepreneurs have found numerous opportunities to put gifts to work for profit. This chapter and the next one consider two of the resulting hybrid forms of economy that have developed in the digital space. While the forms overlap in practice, the next chapter looks at practices in which businesses take advantage of gifts from ordinary users, and this one examines the use of gifts – or something like gifts – by a company to its users. It focuses on Google's enormously profitable linkage of free services with targeted advertising – a linkage that depends on using those free services to acquire data about users. Business models like this, in which wage labour plays a marginal role because the core processes are operated largely by automated technology, illustrate the obsolescence of traditional Marxist analyses of capitalism. But Google's model also exposes the limits of mainstream economics: what is the relevance of price competition in a ‘market’ where the product is free? Neither of the established political economies is equipped to make sense of this kind of economic activity, but we can explain it in terms of interacting appropriative practices, as this chapter will show.

The chapter opens by introducing Google's web search service, then relates it to the concept of inducement gifts: a form of gifts designed to induce the recipient to take actions that generate benefits for the giver. Google has mastered the art of making web advertising highly effective by developing a series of strategies to secure user attachment to its search service, while seeking to minimise the dissatisfiers that advertising often produces: two goals that are often in tension. After examining these tensions, the chapter considers the issues of personalisation and privacy raised by Google's techniques. Finally, it puts together the pieces to summarise the complex of appropriative practices that produces both Google's profits and the search services that a huge proportion of Internet users rely on.

Web search and advertising

Although its enormous profits have allowed it to branch out into many other areas, Google's web search service is the primary source of its wealth and still the core of its business model.

CAN THE OWL OF MINERVA SPREAD ITS WINGS AND FLY?

With a powerful metaphor, philosopher Hegel described philosophy as the Owl of Minerva, which “only when the dusk starts to fall does it spread its wings and fly”. Philosophy comes only at the end of the day, as a descriptive reflection on what happened, and Hegel's owl cannot reverse the motion of the stars and stop the twilight. Economics is the philosophy of modern competition policy: economic theory, competition policy and competition law are inextricably intertwined. Ever since competition law came into existence, the economic theory of competition has exercised its influence upon it. Rules change as, and when, the underlying economic theory changes. As time went by, different paradigms (Neoclassical, Harvard, Chicago, Game theory) informed antitrust enforcement. Competition policy changes because the definition of competition, the way it works and how it can be promoted are not univocal and eternal tenets in the economic science.

Pretty much like Hegel's owl of Minerva, they rather followed changes in economic history and society. For instance, the theory of perfect competition is clearly modelled after the agricultural market, which was easier to observe when the competition was described as emerging among atomistic producers of homogeneous goods. Features of specific markets observed by economists in a given historical period did shape the content of an otherwise vague concept such as barriers to entry: economies of scale reflect the importance of the efficient plant size in classic manufacturing industries; capital investments reflect the historical scarcity of these assets before the improvement of legal tools to raise capital; the idea that aggressive advertising can be a limit to competition is linked to the emergence of traditional media such as newspapers and television, which created a limited number of powerful channels to reach consumers. Much of the reflection about distribution agreements, tying and bundling came of course after the emergence of department stores and distribution networks.

But unlike the owl of Minerva, which can only come to the scene too late to give instructions about how the world ought to be, economic theory does affect economic relations by informing competition law.

A Short Answer

Now we turn to the other links you see on a search-result webpage; not the ads or sponsored search results, but the actual ranking of webpages by search engines such as Google. We will see that, each time you search on www.google.com, Google solves a very big system of linear equation to rank the webpages.

The idea of embedding links in text dates back to the middle of the last century. As the Internet scaled up, and with the introduction of the web in 1989, the browser in 1990, and the web portal in 1994, this vision was realized on an unprecedented scale. The network of webpages is huge: somewhere between 40 billion and 60 billion according to various estimates. And most of them are connected to each other in a giant component of this network. It is also sparse: most webpages have only a few hyperlinks pointing inward from other webpages or pointing outward to other webpages. Google search organizes this huge and sparse network by ranking the webpages.

More important webpages should be ranked higher. But how do you quantify how important a webpage is? Well, if there are many other important webpages pointing towards webpage A, A is probably important. This argument implicitly assumes two ideas:

1. • Webpages form a network, where a webpage is a node, and a hyperlink is a directed link in the network: webpage A may point to webpage B without B pointing back to A.

2. We can turn the seemingly circular logic of “important webpages pointing to you means you are important” into a set of equations that characterize the equilibrium (a fixed-point equilibrium, not a game-theoretic Nash equilibrium) in terms of a recursive definition of “importance.” This importance score will then act as an approximation of the ultimate test of search engines: how useful a user finds the search results.

The explosion in Web 2.0 tools, the number of blogs, and the increase in MySpace pages are stark indicators that the environment in which information professionals are operating looks very different from the way it looked as recently as two years ago. At the Open University (OU) Library we have responded to these changes by producing a new course, TU120 Beyond Google, in collaboration with academic colleagues from the Faculty of Technology.

Background

Between 2002 and 2005 the OU offered a course called U120 MOSAIC (Making Sense of Information in the Connected Age). Beyond Google started life as a suggestion for an updated version of U120. However, it quickly became clear that what we had intended as a relatively straightforward ‘refreshing’ of the U120 content wasn't appropriate given the marked changes in the information landscape. Beyond Google includes more typically ‘academic’ content, rather than revolving around skills development, which had been our focus with U120. It was inevitable, then, that the course should feature some of the Web 2.0 tools that are becoming part and parcel of our interactions with information. We have, however, tried to take a holistic view, where the tools are inseparable from the skills, and have been able to introduce students to a range of Web 2.0 technologies as a result.

Beyond Google sits within the OU's Relevant Knowledge programme, which includes other short courses on such diverse topics as digital photography and computer security. The course is worth ten points at level one (entry level). Given the subject matter, it is also entirely online, with support provided by a team of moderators via a system of online forums. The course runs over ten weeks twice a year, in October and May. One considerable benefit of working within the OU's course production system is the luxury of teaching time. A short course at the OU lasts 100 hours over ten weeks, as opposed to the 45 minutes many of us are used to when meeting students at induction. This has given us opportunities to explore technologies and develop activities that we had not previously been able to consider, not least of which is persuading students to explore the possibilities of search beyond search engines, hence the course name.