understanding google

This thesis explores the impact of search engines within contemporary digital culture and, in particular, focuses on the social, cultural, and philosophical influence of Google. Search engines are deeply enmeshed with other recent developments in digital culture; therefore, in addressing their impact these intersections must be recognised, while highlighting the technological and social specificity of search engines. Also important is acknowledging the way that certain institutions, in particular Google, have shaped the web and wider culture around a particular set of economic incentives that have far-reaching consequences for contemporary digital culture. This thesis argues that to understand search engines requires a recognition of its contemporary context, while also acknowledging that Google's quest to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is part of a much older and broader discourse. Balancing these two viewpoints is important; Google is shaping public discourse on a global scale with unprecedentedly extensive consequences. However, many of the issues addressed by this thesis would remain centrally important even if Google declared bankruptcy or if search engines were abandoned for a different technology. Search engines are a specific technological response to a particular cultural environment; however, their social function and technical operation are embedded within a historical relationship to enquiry and inscription that stretches back to antiquity.