Deep Methods for the Info-Political Study of Search Engines

Richard Rogers

Google, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, has come under increasing scrutiny from 'googlization' scholars, who are reinventing mass media critique for new media. For example, Google's PageRank and the imitations are together an example of media concentration in the sense that there are no alternative search engine algorithms in wide usage. Additionally, the barriers -- financial, technological and otherwise -- to becoming a competitor are so high as to be nearly insurmountable. (Garage start-ups need not consider it.) However, less critical attention has been paid to second-order forms of Googlization, that is, the delivery style of information and knowledge more generally these days. The presentation concentrates on device-centric, "deep" methods that capture and critique both the formats and content currently served by engines.

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