Deleterious consequences: How Google's original sociotechnical affordances ultimately shaped ‘trusted users’ in surveillance capitalism

Abstract

Google dominates around 92% of the search market worldwide (as of November 2022), with most of its revenue derived from search advertising. However, Google's hegemony over search and the resulting implications are not necessarily accidental, arbitrary or (un)intentional. This article revisits Brin and Page's original paper, drawing on six of their key innovations, concerns and design choices (counting citations or backlinks, trusted user, advertising, personalization, usage data, smart algorithms) to explain the evolution of Google's hypertext search engine technologies through ‘moments of contingency’, which led to corporate lock-ins. Underpinned by analyses of patents, statements and secondary sources, it elucidates how early Google considerations and certain affordances not only came to shape the web (backlinks, trusted user, advertising) but subsequently facilitated contemporary surveillance capitalism. Building upon Zuboff's ‘Big Other’, it describes the ways in which Google as an infrastructure is intertwined with Big Data's platformization and the ad infinitum collection of usage data, beyond just personalization. This extraction and refinement of usage data as ‘behavioural surplus’ results in ‘deleterious consequences’: a ‘habit of automaticity,’ which shapes the trusted user through ‘ubiquitous googling’ and smart algorithms, whilst simultaneously generating prediction products for surveillance capitalism. Advancing Latour's ‘predicting the path’ of technological innovation, this cause-and-effect story contributes a new taxonomy of Google sociotechnical affordances to critical STS, media history and web search literature.