How Search Changed Everything

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

Everywhere you look the last week or so, there have been blog posts, newspaper articles, and anything else you can imagine, all devoted to the biggest things of the 00’s, the naughts, the 2000s, or whatever else you want to call them. And there are a lot of good candidates, from the iPod to the Blackberry and much more.

But I’d argue that the biggest thing to happen in the decade from 2000-2009 was search. Search existed before 2000, but became the integral part of the infrastructure of the Internet in the decade that’s just ended, and isn’t showing any signs of reversing that trend in the decade to come. I’d argue the Internet’s success is totally dependent on the maturation of search, and its effects are felt by nearly everyone.

The Internet is ridiculously huge, full of lots of information on any conceivable subject. The original hyperlinking system of the Internet, while allowing for people to jump from page to page, doesn’t scale with how the Internet was growing, and how people were starting to interact with it.

With so much information available on the Web, and millions of new people gaining Web access every day, users needed a way to organize the Web for themselves. Using a system that everyone uses wouldn’t work – there’s just too much out there – so the Web needed a way to show people what they wanted to see at any given time. That solution was search, particularly Google Search.

What search did was tailor results to you, and only you. It broke down the Internet into tiny, consumable pieces based on the exact thing you wanted to see, right now. There’s no need to go from link to link hoping to find what you actually want to see, because you can find it by itself. Search isolates what you want from the rest of the Web, and shows it to you in about .02 seconds. No thumbing through card catalogs or flipping through books—search takes you right to the page you’re looking for, as if the rest of the book didn’t exist.

Now, instead of a few sites that everyone visits, there are a million sites that a few people visit—this idea is known as the Long Tail, and is discussed brilliantly by Chris Anderson of Wired. That has allowed for niches to emerge that wouldn’t have otherwise, and for people to rally around any idea or subject, no matter how far removed it is from the mainstream.

Search has found its way into so many facets of our lives it’s staggering. Imagine if you had to go through your emails one-by-one to find the one you were looking for? Or, if you wanted to find a file on your computer, you’d have to create and maintain a carefully organized and perfectly transparent folder structure? The time saved by simply being able to key in a search is incredible, and brings us answers we probably wouldn’t find otherwise.

The consequences of this have been widespread—the a la carte consumption that comes from search extends to things like the death of the music album and the rise of the single, because you don’t have to wade through the crappy filler just to get to the good stuff. Some people have argued Google is making us stupid, “chipping away at my capacity for concentration,” as Nicholas Carr laments.

But I don’t think so. I think search, rather than necessarily making us stupid, is just changing how we absorb information. Whether it’s for better or for worse I’m not sure, but it’s changing things: the depth to which we’re able to go on a given subject is incredible, but it’s equally easy and enticing to skim the surface of a number of different topics, gaining a little knowledge about a lot of things. I’m not sure which is better or worse, or if one even is.

Search is opening doors and exposing us to exactly what we want to see. The potential downsides of this are as plentiful as the obvious upsides – fractionalization of the world into “echo chambers,” people looking for (and finding, thanks to the near-infinite information on the Web) only what agrees with them, and the breakdown of democracy.

Search has changed the economy, allowing for niche products and little-known greats to be found by those looking for it. OneRepublic, Taylor Swift, and other brand-name bands first found on MySpace can attest to that. Search is changing how we learn, giving us instant access to whatever we’re looking for, meaning that maybe the most useful skill is not memorization of fact but perfection of searching skills. Politically, the jury might still be out, but Cass Sunstein writes as compelling a book as I’ve ever seen on the subject.

The implementations of search into our lives is only just beginning—local search promises to show us who and what is near us at any time, and augmented reality promises to make the physical world as searchable as the digital one. The 10’s will be the decade when the digital world meets the physical, and computing becomes as ubiquitous as, and maybe synonymous with, fresh air.

Whether universal and instant access to information is a good thing remains to be seen. But what I think is clear is that search has fundamentally changed how the Internet works, how we interact with the world around us, and even how our brains work.

What do you think? Does search matter? Is it for better, or for worse?

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