Bertie, on the Down Low

Andrew Brown compares personalized search results from Google with everybody’s favorite P.G. Wodehouse characters:

The more perfectly Google plays the role of a valet, a butler, an unshockable servant who knows our own desires better than we do, the less we will learn about the world which knows and cares nothing for our wishes. . . .[¶] [T]he more that Google becomes like Jeeves, omniscient, omnicompetent, and endlessly flattering, the more it reduces us to Bertie Woosters.

Which is debatable. Some of us routinely bend over backward in the search field to find critical, unfavorable, and otherwise challenging sources. (After reading some of Walter Kaufmann’s The Faith of a Heretic the other day, I spent quite a long time on Google trying to find unflattering remarks about Kaufmann.) When shopping for books on Amazon.com, I almost compulsively go straight to the one-star reviews because I think people who give good reviews are generally just attention-hogs and not really interested in sharing helpful information about the book.  (I also like to comment on the really bad one-star reviews and explain why they are deficient, which probably surprises no one who knows me, or who has read my blog for long enough to remember when it was considerably more acerbic.)

So I think personalized search results from Google are generally a good thing, provided searchers are critical thinkers to begin with. But that’s been the problem with online search for as long as anyone can remember. (Because, you know, how did we live before Google? Obviously, we didn’t. I propose a third calendar era: A.G., or “After Google.” This year is probably 13 A.G.)

Brown passes by, almost without remark (see the sarcastic “Thanks a lot, Eric” that closes paragraph three), the really troubling thing in his piece—this quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time.

Really? There are no innocent secrets? No rushing undercurrent of evolutionary history in the subconscious mind, no roaring animal desires trying always to break through the rational veneer of the neocortex? Why do you think people prefer to defecate in private? There’s nothing wrong with excreting your waste; we just don’t want other people keeping tabs on when and how we do it. Maybe we are embarrassed, but no one seriously thinks we shouldn’t be. People read books about fictional characters, and sometimes about real-life characters, who behave in ways that the readers would never behave. But reading is private, and so is the individual exploration of the heights and depths of existence. People do not like to reveal their occasional thoughts of murderous rage, or their feelings of lusty desire, or their ignorance of apparently well-known facts. None of those things are wrong. Nobody should ask people to purge themselves of their human nature. We ask only that our fellow members of society control their actions, not their thoughts, which would probably terrify us.

And searching for something on Google is not doing something. If you search for “how to commit murder,” you haven’t done anything. Maybe you’re researching a novel you want to write, or maybe you’re indulging your private curiosity, with no intent of ever actually committing the crime. And maybe, like when you need to excrete some waste, you don’t really want anybody to know. So when Schmidt says of people who don’t like Google retaining information about their searches that “maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” he demonstrates not just insensitivity, but shocking ignorance about the nature of his fellow human beings.

I use Google every day. (And Gmail, and Google Docs, and Google Finance, and Google Scholar.) With so much information available online, we need a tool to help sort it out; we need a Jeeves. But I would prefer that our Jeeves not have the foolish and ignorant views of Eric Schmidt.