MARKETING MIX

Human life can be described as a prolonged dialogue with the world. Man interrogates the world and is interrogated by the world. This dialogue is

regulated by the way in which we define the legitimate questions that we may

address to the world or the world may address to us – and the way in which

we can identify the relevant answers to these questions. (Groys 147)

Groys’ piece opens with an emphasis on rules and the way that in order for

questions to be asked they must be expressed in a legitimate form that responds to a given context. Search engines, on the other hand, do not require inputs in the form of questions. The way in which Google responds to queries is by providing links to “all the accessible contexts in which this word [or combination of words] occurs (148). This enables queries to cover a greater remit than traditional questions; however, without the logical, rhetorical or dialectical structures that characterise traditional questions, queries act in a very different manner. Groys sees the way that Google queries attend to language as an extension of the non-normative claims of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida in which the meaning of words is dictated by context and endlessly shifting chains of signification. Groys goes on to argue that

Google, therefore, can be seen as an answer to deconstruction in at least two ways. On the one hand, Google is based on the same understanding of language as topological space, in which individual words follow their own trajectories - undermining any attempts to territorialize them in fixed,

privileged, normative contexts and to ascribe to them normative meanings. On the other hand, Google is nonetheless based on the belief that these

trajectories are finite, and so can be calculated and displayed. […] One can say that Google turns deconstruction from its head onto its feet by replacing a potentially infinite, but only imaginary, proliferation of contexts with a finite search engine. (150-151)

Here, Groys provides a fruitful frame of reference. Much of the existing literature that investigates search engines derives from an information retrieval (IR) disciplinary background and frames this philosophical shift only in terms of success and failure. For example, John Battelle’s early study of search engines (published in 2005) compared the results for the search query [usher] of Yahoo and Google (237-239) in which, he “presume[s] the person typing that search in reality does want to know about the popular singer by the same name” (238). He then compares the way in which both search engines deal with results that are unrelated to Usher the singer, for example “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the communication disorder “usher syndrome”. A full discussion of how various hangovers from IR have shaped search engine evaluation, particularly the elusive metric of relevance, takes place in chapter four. A range of social science techniques exist for numerically measuring success or relevance of search engine results.11 _{“Search Engines Evaluation”, written by} Kumar et al. is a good example of such literature, the conclusion of which begins, “Lord Kelvin once said that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it” (9). Such a simplification does not describe all IR research, but there is certainly a tendency within the field to tune-

11 _{See Lewandowski “A Framework” for a literature review of “Retrieval Effectiveness Tests” and}

Jansen and Molina “The Effectiveness” for a literature review of “Web Search Engine Relevance Evaluation”.

out richly incalculable moments, in any medium of discovery. Groys’ deconstructive context helps foreground the shifting nature of meaning that the form of search engine queries accentuates. One particular overarching narrative in the last twenty years of search engines is the importance of context and the proliferation of vantage points, a topic which will be thoroughly outlined in chapter four.

As Groys’ piece continues, he stretches his claims into conclusions about Google’s effect on language that simply have no bearing on any available evidence. However, highlighting why his argument fails to reflect actual search engine

technology provides a useful opportunity to further outline the differences between questions and queries. As “Google: Words Beyond Grammar” draws to a close Groys’ introduces Martin Heidegger’s notion, taken from his “Letter on ‘Humanism’”, of “language as a house of being – a house in which man dwells” (151), which image Groys uses to argue that Google Search has caused “the liberation of individual words from their syntactical arrangements [which] turns the house of language into a word cloud. Man becomes linguistically homeless” (152) and in turn, this has created a situation in which “all words are already recognized as ‘metaphysically’ free and equal” (155). Heidegger’s original point in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” is about the impoverishment of language, when treated as pure utility, that prevents the right ontological questions to be formulated. Heidegger’s thought is used throughout this thesis; however, Groys’ use here, to argue that words become free and equal, is misleading. Even if early search engines treated all words equally, contemporary incarnations have established a nuanced semantic structuring. The most recent iteration of this structuring is the implementation of Google’s Knowledge Graph, launched in 2012, which draws from data correlations to build up a semantic map of words and phrases (see fig. 11).

Figure 11. One of Amit Singhal’s examples of the semantic search of Knowledge Graph, taken from his 2012 blog post “Introducing the Knowledge Graph: Things, Not Strings”.

“Knowledge Vault” (Dong et al.) is an academic paper from a team at Google that explains part of the technical details, while Singhal’s 2012 official Google blog post outlines the implications for users. Singhal describes how Google’s Knowledge Graph categorises words and phrases as object or linked facts about objects so as to better categorise associations between query search terms. When Knowledge Graph launched, Singhal announced that it contained “500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects” (“Introducing knowledge Graph”). In 2016 Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, reported the number of facts held in Google’s Knowledge Graph had increased to over 70 billion. Although Google’s web index, from which it draws its search

results, is becoming increasingly structured many of Groys’ conclusions still hold, in particular, the way in which queries are linguistically structured very differently from questions, the details of which constitute the following section. However, Groys’ claim that the ties between words have been cut has never been true of search engines, even in their earliest days before the more recent advances in semantic search. Examples above, from the metaword tags used by AltaVista to the hyperlink measurements PageRank, represent active linguistic and extra-linguistic grammars. That HTML standards, as well as reading expectations, have directed the layout norms of webpages to reproduce various skeuomorphic resonances means that languages function in a similar way as they do offline. MacCormick’s malaria example, demonstrating how AltaVista established a way of taking account of the distances between words, means that the kinds of pages that rank highly are those which the grammar and word order reflect the kinds of grammar and word order of queries. These relationships might not look like traditional grammar, but even in the early stages of search engines, structural rules that govern language operated in direct ways to enforce striations of meaning. In addition, as outlined above, the kinds of pages that PageRank designates as important are often those of established institutions; consequently, very traditional forms of grammar are prioritised and encourage many kinds of unestablished websites to follow these pre-digital norms. There are exceptions of course, but generally speaking grammar is still an important part of the search engines, the web, and the interaction between the two.