Fourth Source

Contributed by Matthew Oxley, Head of Search at Gravytrain

Predictive Search, Social Search – whatever you want to call it – it’s what everyone’s talking about, the flavour of the month, the next big thing, the future. What a brilliant concept – if I search for “Indian Restaurant”, I get a list of restaurants near where I live, some restaurants close to where I am right now and perhaps even, because Google+ knows I’m going Ice skating later, some restaurants near the rink. Imagine also that, because the search engine knew my dietary preferences, it might also display the restaurants that can cater for these higher. Oh, and let’s not forget my friend Abi who works for a restaurant not too far from the rink – that’s certain to be in there.

It’s hard to argue that social search doesn’t bring some great opportunities for the user, and perhaps also some interesting opportunities for advertisers. The problem can be when it goes too far. So far most of the Social networks have at some stage appeared to underestimate people’s fondness for privacy – Facebook is only just getting their own PR nightmares with regards to Privacy, and Linkedin have more recently come under fire about their new ‘social ads’.

With the advent of Google+ , Google now has access to our social data they’ve craved for years (at least for 20m+ of us). With fast adoption of + comes Google’s ability to predict exactly what we’re looking for. As Google’s Schmidt puts it, “With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

To see why that might not be so beneficial, let’s take the following example– a happily married man (surfer A) is talking to his friend (surfer B) over a private message about his friend’s marriage woes, when surfer A helpfully decides to let surfer B know about a divorce solicitor he used for a previous divorce by sending him a link of the law firm’s Google+ page. When Surfer A’s wife next uses the home desktop and starts to search for “Marylebone Summer fair” she is instantly presented with results for divorce solicitors in Kingston (Surfer A’s workplace). What’s more, the search engine has helpfully suggested websites they might want to revisit, with the said Lawyer’s previous solicitor showing. This all happened because, in the seemingly imperative need to stop the user having to waste 10 seconds typing, the search engine picked up on the first few letters of the search (mar), realised the surfer (or at least Surfer A) had recently visited a solicitors website, and put 2 & 2 together.

Similar versions of the above story can be found all over the web arguing against all sorts of different things, and you can customise it to fit the level at which it scares you; let’s switch the husband and wife around in the previous example and say that the husband is abusive – now the impact is serious. The potential of social search to have an undesirable impact is probably as obvious as the benefits highlighted earlier.

Google would probably argue that the latter would be ‘extremely unlikely’ to happen, possibly pointing out the already extremely sophisticated controls and algorithms they have built. Whether or not that makes you feel any better probably depends on whether you believe faulty algorithms are the underlying problem. To put it another way, algorithms meant to read the minds of users, typically would suffer from problems related to any type of artificial intelligence system – at worst they are far less able than humans, and at their best they tend to be about as good as a human with the same data (if somewhat quicker). And there is the problem; we don’t necessarily want to share too much with other people, never mind a computer.

Think about the examples of human interaction in day to day life and it’s abundantly clear that people like to keep control of their personal information from other people – the employee being coy about his whereabouts with his gossipy co-workers, the young lady reading on her kindle to avoid stares from fellow commuters, the young teenager checking his phone in private to stop his schoolmates finding out about his new girlfriend.  The fact is we all have secrets to keep at times, and we often need to make a judgement – even subconsciously – about how much we trust another person with this information. Sometimes our reasons for hiding things from others are well meaning, and sometimes they aren’t, but when Schmidt, in a different speech says “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place” he worryingly only acknowledges one of these two possibilities.

In day to day life, it’s quite possible to guard how much you share with other people, but it’s hard to see this could apply to your digital life (It’s easy to control what is displayed – privacy settings can take care of that) – once Google has collected all of its data about you, and made assumptions about what it means, it might not even be safe to show it to the surfer themselves. There’s no way Google can know if it’s actually you using your computer, whether you are  being monitored, or whether somebody is currently over your shoulder – combine that with the almost impossible task of being 100% right, 100% of the time,  on the context and meaning of that data, and you have a catastrophic recipe for disaster.

People have a right to keep their data private, and it’s not a right that will be surrendered easily – take the battle the previous UK government faced over identity cards and you have a classic example of people’s resistance to any infringement on privacy. If people don’t want to share more information in the hope of preventing terrorism, then they certainly aren’t going to do the same to boost the bottom line of a search engine.

Maybe Google will get what Facebook and the others have got wrong, and ere on the side of the caution. Maybe they’ll find the magic balance between convenience and infringement. Maybe we’ll be celebrating  Google’s personalised search as the final nail in the coffin for other inferior search engines. However, when we take Schmidt’s quotes, combined with the lamentable history of their rivals, it doesn’t take a cynic to predict that search could get a whole lot creepier, fast.