In April of this year, Google's Official Blog proudly announced "the worldwide rollout of local search results", an across-the-net and around-the-world expansion of their location-based search results. Formerly, if you entered a keyword like "pizza" as a search term but didn't include a city, postal code, or area code along with it, chances were you'd receive a generic list of search results, ranked by some algorithm or other, and directing you toward the most popular/most-trafficked web pages. If you had an iGoogle page or Gmail account, and you'd logged into it before starting your search, you might also receive a local map pinpointing "pizza" search results near whatever location you'd indicated months or years before as your home area, way back when you'd first registered your G-account.
Initially, the global advent of Google's location-based search results seems innocuous enough. But, let's check the fine print, shall we? In Google's own words, from "Web Search Help >> Features >> Search customization" details --
"When you perform a search,...the results [may] have been significantly customized based on one or more of the following factors:
Location: If you're signed in to your Google Account, your search results may be customized for a default location that you've previously specified (for example, in Google Maps). If you're not signed in, then results may be customized for an approximate location based on your IP address... Your specific location will be used not only for customizing search results, but also to improve your experience....
Recent searches: We take into account whether a particular query followed on the heels of another query. Because recent search activity provides valuable context for understanding the meaning behind your searches, we use it to customize your results whenever possible, regardless of whether you're signed in or signed out. In order to customize your results and show you the customization details, we keep recent searches in a cookie on your browser for approximately 30 minutes. After approximately 30 minutes, this cookie is removed from your browser. Completely closing your browser will remove this cookie immediately.
On rare occasions, recent searches may be kept on your browser for a different time duration as Google experiments with improving quality. In all cases, recent searches are not kept on your browser for more than 24 hours and the link to the search customization page will not be accessible after approximately 30 minutes from the time of the search.
Web History: If you're signed in and have Web History enabled, we customize your search results based on what you've searched for in the past on Google, and what sites you've visited. If there's a particular search that you'd rather not have personalized based on your Web History, you can also just temporarily sign out of your Google Account."
[_excerpt is from http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93704. N.B., (i) the emphases are mine;
(ii) Google includes a link under "Web History" for users of most major browsers to permanently disable the Web History feature]
I hope you read those three search factors s-l-o-w-l-y and carefully. Very carefully.
Now, before you jump the gun, dear reader, this is not an essay on The Great Google Conspiracy (i.e., Google Is Invading My Privacy/Google Is Reading My Gmail/Google Is Tracking My Movements). Nope, nope, nope. This is not an essay about Big Brother is Watching You. This article is not about any conspiracy. It is, however, about Google's clearly declared intention.
Google wants to be your mother.
"Is Google Making Us Stupid?", asks author Nicholas Carr (July/August 2008, The Atlantic Monthly, as an excerpt from his book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google) Carr answers, "The company [Google] has declared that its mission is 'to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.' It seeks to develop 'the perfect search engine,' which it defines as something that 'understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want."
Just gurgle "Goo-goo, ga-ga!" and Mama Google will discern what the Little Baby wants. Little Baby doesn't have to develop any articulate speech, Little Baby doesn't have to learn any skills of expression or clarity of thought, Little Baby doesn't need any mature discernment or critical analysis. Mama Google will read your mind -- your GPS, your IP, your ISP, your recent searches, your web history -- and offer you exactly the toys you want. Well, exactly the toys they say you want. It is an insidious tautology of circular reasoning, destined to keep the baby a baby.
The "Google Becomes More Local" bray in April (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-becomes-more-local.html) takes on a distinctly insidious Mother-Smother feel when you read those three paragraphs above and consider their repercussions.
Ever taken one of those horrid career interest inventory tests? Designed on the principle of "tell us about the work you've done so far and we'll project the work you'll want to do in the future" they aren't unlike Google's "...we customize your search results based on what you've searched for in the past on Google, and what sites you've visited" and "recent search activity provides valuable context for understanding the meaning behind your searches, we use it to customize your results whenever possible". Both the test results and your research results are biased toward a similar conlusion: because you've been There In the Past, We're Sending You There for Your Future.
Instead of a compass to new horizons and unexplored territory, the search algorithms point you to old, worn trails across your own back yard. Using your unarticulated gurgles and the triangulation of Location, Recent Searches, and Web History, Google gives you the answers she wants you to have. Isn't that wonderful? Now you don't have to bother learning to think for yourself or to speak for yourself, just let Mama take care of you.
Yes, it is super-keen that someone can use their i-Phone to locate a neighborhood pizza joint, but for other web explorers -- the naturally curious and adventurous, researchers, writers, and the increasing thousands of people who live and work "Here" but whose clients, interests and intentions await some future definition -- the triple whammy Google uses to determine our search results is a frustrating, aggravating waste of time, more hazard than help.
Certainly, as an "industrial user" of Google and a long-time Mac owner, I know about clearing my browser history, blocking cookies from third parties and advertisers, and setting my Google Preferences/Advanced Settings. I also know how to craft a keyword search and use Boolean logic; to a modest extent, I understand Search Engine Optimisation and algorithms.
What I don't know -- and earnestly hope for -- is a means to eliminate or opt out of Google's new, relentless, intrusive and cumbersome "suggestions" now warping my search results. Here is a very minor example, yet symbolic of what happens on the larger scale: during a recent and relatively simple search for a client's project, the results continued to include items that were relevant to my location, despite clear specification in Advanced Settings to eliminate my location as a keyword. Another: Just because I check the weather report in Springfield, Mass. or Rabat, Morocco, in an idle moment of curiosity of my workday, doesn't mean I want continual geographically-specific references for those locations throughout the rest of my search session.
"In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction." (From "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", Atlantic Monthly: The Atlantic, July/August 2008 -- http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google)
Despite its occasional misfires and outright blunders, I am a Google fan: it is a useful, even essential, tool for my livelihood. However, like any tool, it is useful only as it serves my purposes and intentions, not when it alters my work to serve the purposes of the tool. My toybox -- the vast information available to me via the world wide web -- is fast being restricted by Mama Google, shrunken to playing only in my own back garden.
Postscript on 29th June 09 - One of my web-pals sent me this link to an ongoing discussion at the Google Forums. If you doubt the significance of the "who's minding the search" issue, you need only look at the comments (the less Boolean ones!) in that thread by Thomas P and mooredc54.
Kahve, The Joys of Java
Once upon a time in the U.S., a "good" cup of coffee had less to do with the coffee's roast, grind, brew or flavour, and everything to do with the beverage being hot, plentiful, and cheap. Very confusing for a girl who came from a people who prepared coffee as a ritual, rich with significance, laden with happy memories of family, community, and leisurely late-night celebrations of friendship. I missed that, I missed it a lot: coffee is love, to share coffee with a friend is to share love, to build intimacy, trust, and community.
Within my family tribe, when we tease one another about the Sacred Bean or the Holy Brew, it is only half in jest. Guests at my parties share the inside joke about my Coffee Altar, the specially-designated chest standing at the entrance to my kitchen: it is filled with my coffees, coffee gear and paraphernalia, favourite cups arranged by the mood or activity that each one suits -- one for watching the sunset from my patio, another for the end of a too-long workday, a bone china cup and saucer for when I need to restore my sense of elegance, a deep, hand-painted Italian mug for work/think/smoke sessions.
Thankfully, with the advent of Starbucks, the coffee experience in the U.S. began to reclaim the joy it had always signified for me and, better still, I could share the joie d'java with my friends and neighbours.
Ca Phe Sua Da - Coffee as Ritual
My most sublime java joys have been celebrated in offbeat cafes, sidewalk bistros, in a convent among nuns from Nova Scotia, and in the homes of friends met during my travels.
One particular coffee encounter I cherish happened when we took Ca Phe Sua Da on the verandah of our Viet Namese hosts' home. In Buon Ma Thuot, a coffee-growing region, authentic Ca Phe Sua Da is made with the velvety dark Trung Nguyen Culi varietal blend, in a medium coarse grind. Delicate whispers of dark cocoa and cardamom silken its finish, the aroma wafting and winding around us.
Ca Phe Sua Da is coffee as a sacred rite and work of art. The preparation begins with a special metal filter that sits atop a tall, narrow, heavy-bottomed glass as rich, fragrant might-as-well-be-espresso liquid slow-drips directly into the glass, an exercise in discipline and anticipation.
As we wait and watch, our host explains how every family has its own special ritual, their own personal style for preparing and serving Ca Phe Sua Da. In her family's tradition, the glasses of coffee were brimmed with smooth chunks of coffee ice, then a thick creamy-blonde ribbon of sweetened condensed milk was layered to fill the bottom finger or two of each glass. As she presents the brass tray with our individual glasses, Tui posed mint sprigs and enameled stir-sticks at the lip of each glass and showed us how to sip and swirl, sip and swirl, until everything but the mint and the bittersweet memory was consumed. The first long draught erased the sweaty day, the second ushered in a sultry, enchanted, mesmerising night, leisurely paced for a late evening chat-fest.
The aesthetics of such alchemy cannot be reproduced with plastic stirrers, paper cups, or SOP manuals. The mint sprig would never survive the withering corporate touch. Just the same, many times while chatting with my mates on some sun-drenched 'Bucks patio, I've imagined how wonderful it would be to raise a toast to our friendship with a round of this icy, bitter-sweet elixir.
Gotta go, I've talked myself into a java frame of mind. 
About the mystical and marvelous connection between
chillin' out on the patio and marketing research
Anyone who talks with this java junkie for ten minutes knows I can circumnavigate the globe with the best GPS ever created, Global Positioning via Starbucks. Drop me anywhere on the planet, and I will find my way to the nearest Starbucks or patio-con-cafe. Want to know the coffee house with the best patio, best espresso shot, best crew, worst bathrooms, most corporate lockstep, most responsive and responsible management? Call me.
My point? An alert participant in life, his community, and in mundane, everyday conversations can gather an abundance of useful information, voluntarily offered and unintrusively gathered. A top-flight marketing strategist needn't invade people's privacy or manipulate them to get pertinent data of prospects' lives and habits in order to reach them with convincing marketing. Listen ' til it hurts (and trust me, it will hurt), pay attention, watch, interpret, talk a little, question. PARTICIPATE.
As a friend of mine in the U.K. says, "Only Americans need a million-dollar survey to tell them the bleeding obvious."
W. Edwards Deming (my business hero) noted the proclivity of American big business to dismiss "unknown and unknowable factors" and business anomalies when he was a consultant to post-war Japan, helping them re-invent their economy. Although he was a reknowned statistician, Deming stated "one of the seven deadly diseases of management is running a company on visible figures alone" -- banking every decision on "statistics in a vacuum." While American executives remote-controlled their decisions by commissioning study after study of consumer behaviour, Japanese companies sent executives and employes to the marketplace, to observe consumer behaviour first-hand -- at the sales counters, in the appliance stores, in the automobile dealerships. As Americans lagged behind in the technology and manufacturing race, insistently making big, gas-guzzling cars with fins, the Japanese passed them by with micro-circuitry, compact cars, and attention to detail. "Made in Japan" became not something to ridicule, but something to emulate.
Decades later, here goes American business again, this time with algorithms and "reality mining" overruling common sense. To entrepreneurs, micropreneurs, solo-preneurs and marketing people everywhere: Get out of your cubicles, java-chat your patio mates, and download real life.
After you've done your reality check, then you can supplement what you've heard, observed, and learned with surveys and statistical studies. With an open mind and open heart, reassess your strategy, rewrite your business plan. Yes, it may mean pulling a 180 and going an entirely new direction with your cherished, long-harboured idea. It could mean ditching it and starting from scratch.
Scary? Yes. Initially, gut-wrenchingly disappointing. Bewildering. But, profound knowledge (remember, no more "data in a vacuum") is a "[l]ong-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy [and] is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment."
You want BUZZ? Go for a coffee at the scene of the crime.
See you on the patio! ;-)
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