Search on Internet: Change is the only constant

In literature and philosophy, in both West and East, the notion of search refers to expansive, ambitious human pursuits. We have, alternately, searched for the Promised Land and the holy grail.

Astronomers have searched for life in outer space. The Buddha searched for truth.

But search on the Internet has shifted in recent years. Search is now what the Web companies call “personalised,” or in Facebook-speak, “social.” This new kind of search is designed to make more money for industry by helping them target advertising. The companies say it can be useful for consumers, and it well may be in certain circumstances. It also threatens to narrow our horizons.

For Google, personalised search tracks what we search for and write in our e-mail communications, and so seeks to know us so well that its robots can predict what we want to know. As a colleague has pointed out, search for “Sonoma wineries” and Google may show a forgotten but relevant e-mail conversation from your in-box. Its algorithms can mine, in addition to links from around the Web, what your friends on Google+ have said about Sonoma wineries.

That doesn’t mean you cannot ditch your friends’ recommendations of course, nor that you cannot talk to the woman at the wine shop to recommend something to pair with mussels. But it makes serendipity that much more difficult to achieve. It diminishes discovery.

Twitter’s “discovery” tab predicts what you wish to read. Yelp shows you the taquerias and dry cleaners your friends favour – followed by the recommendations of strangers. Amazon.com serves up things you might like to buy “based on your browsing history.”

Facebook recently stepped into the search game, as expected. It will deploy the data that we have laid at its doorstep. Ask a question and Facebook’s robots will crawl through your friends’ posts to ferret out an answer. Theoretically, these answers will shape the music you listen to, the books you read — perhaps one day, which gods you worship.

In the era of social search, how luxurious it is to squirrel away in a library and browse the poetry aisles. How thrilling to walk through a city, unknown and undisturbed, and venture into a restaurant to taste something new and odd. Webster’s says the word “search” came from the Latin word, “circare,” to go about. It is defined principally as “to look into or over carefully or thoroughly in an effort to find out or discover something.”