I got kind of sentimental while I read the first three chapters of John Battelle´s “The Search”. The years of the computing revolution, 1985-1995, where the years I went to highschool. A few years ago I had played Ping Pong on a monochrome screen, a revelation, later on Space Invaders, and only two, three years later Maniac Mansion. It´s not that we were exactly the spearheads of this development, you know. In classroom, we programmed circles with a rightly forgotten program named Dr. Logo while Steve Jobs was losing his job at Apple. ( I wasn´t even able to find a link to Dr. Logo on the internet. Sad, sad story.) It all changed however when I started going to university in 1994, a time when the number of websites started to grow exponentially. I got involved with the students council, and soon I designed a newspaper on a pimped Apple Quadra 900 workstation. What a machine. And man, I encountered the internet, via an back then ridiculously fast 56.6k modem. I was fascinated. Off course we used the Netscape Navigator. Someone introduced me to Altavista, which I found very practical. I did not think a second about the technology and idea behind it, I was just an ordinary user. A couple of years later, Altavista seemed to have lost its momentum, and while I never got warm with Yahoo, I, following better informed friends, started using Google. It was only one or two years before I started my own internet-based company, which again was a little late – we founded it in September 2000, shortly before the .com-bubble imploded.
All in all, I´ve been using Google for almost ten years now. I´ve typed in hundreds of thousands of terms and phrases. Like most of my colleagues, I undertake significantly more searches than the average of one per day Battelle writes about (although it must be more by now). And just as I found with Google, Google found me. Possibly, if you would profile me through my everday searches in the last 10 years, you would be able to draw a more precise portrait than most of my friends. Which is scaring, if you think a future HAL or SkyNet scenario draws close. However improbable that seems not totally far out, if you think that Google, as Battelle writes, takes more than a hundred factors into account to determine a site´s relevance to your keywords. A hundred factors! The interesting question, when it comes to privacy, is how many of those hundred utilize on information about you – your interests, your click history, your web artifacts, etc. I really don´t know if I would support the attempt to make this network self-aware. And there we have it: my search dilemma. Although I want the search engine grow faster and more accurate, I don´t want it to store my information on multiple server racks somewhere in the world. I want it to learn about my habits, and yes, I would even say I want it to understand me better. But in the end, I would like to be in control when it comes to the question of storing or deleting information. I´m afraid chances for that are rather low.
