The Cultural Importance of Search Engines
Search engines seem sort of, well, boring. But they've profoundly shaped modern society and play a vital role in our lives. Why and how?
Search engines just seem to well, be there. We don’t really think much about them. They’ve become in a way, an invisible technology in the sense that like a phone, they’re a tool we take for granted so deeply embedded in our lives as they are today. But search engines have had a much bigger influence on global cultures than we may realise.
Let’s explore the cultural importance and role of search engines. And how search is about to undergo a profound shift. One that will have significant impact on our species.
The first digital age search engine came through ARPANET, a basic, but functioning resource directory that created domains which could be categorised. These would allow the recognition of each computer connected to the internet (the World Wide Web didn’t exist yet). There weren’t billions of devices like today.
Why have search engines played such a significant role in our modern world? Because search is core to our survival as a species. It is the very first thing your brain does upon waking. We look out the window for the weather, just as we once looked out the cave entrance.
We smell for scents familiar and unfamiliar. We search to see if we are physically safe. With the arrival of the smartphone, we began to search for psychological threats and to be assured all is okay.
Smartphones ushered in another significant sociocultural change. Prior to smartphones, identifying threats and opportunities beyond the physical took a while. The earliest way we did this was through newspapers, then radio and television. This gave us time to wake up and evolve our day.
Today, within seconds we are aware of our physical and digital surroundings within seconds of opening our eyes. This is both good and bad, depending on what information you receive.
We spend out entire lives searching. And then there’s our search for information, which we assess and turn into knowledge through understanding. Humans are an information seeking and analysing species.
As we evolved, we began to record knowledge and to disseminate information. First through cave drawings. It was our first attempt to organise and manage information, turning caves into our first search engines and first knowledge management devices, in today’s parlance.
We learned early on that to survive as a species, we must share knowledge, from where to hunt the mastodons to today where we search Google for the actors age in that movie we’re debating at the dinner table. Search is what we do.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were information hunters and gatherers as well as food and materials. We remain the same today. We hunt for information more than ever before, relative to our evolution as a species.
The term “information economy” and “knowledge industries” sounds incredibly futuristic and advanced. In some ways, but not in the most fundamental way. We are doing the same as our foraging ancestors, just in a different context.
We collect information and turn it into knowledge, which we then share. We share through mythologies and stories. This is cultural transmission. Our brains process vast amounts of complex information and we solve problems all day, everyday.
So it shouldn’t really be a surprise that as we developed the internet and Word Wide Web (today, the internet is is synonymous with the two, with some even thinking WiFi is the internet), our natural inclination was to create information. We love to create information and knowledge.
As information grew along with advances in computing and networks so did we develop different ways of organising that information to share with others. A default of our brains is to share with others. If we don’t, we won’t be around for very long as a species.
There as the Archie search engine that came out of McGill University in Montreal in 1990, then Gopher, then with the arrival of the World Wide Web, the Virtual Library and the first WWW search engine, W3Catalog. The first web search engine to use a crawler was JumpStation. Yahoo! came out in late 1993, which then was just a directory engine, search functionality didn’t come until 1995. Google wouldn’t really show up until the end of the 90’s.
Search engines became much hyped, similar to the hype of Blockchain, Crypto, Web3 and Generative AI today. The rise of search engines suddenly made it easier to access cyberspace as we created our digital worlds. The internet was starting to have meaningful sociocultural change. It was the beginning of something significant.
Search engines really began to impact the world socioculturally when we reached some sort of tipping point in terms of the number of people connected, the lower cost of high-speed internet access and the rise of standards for interconnectivity such as https and tcp/ip, and common code like html.
Search engines enabled us to discover other cultures, speed up cultural transmission unlike ever before in human history, serve as a cognitive offloading tool to store memories. Too, search engines have been political as well, such as Google having to leave China and Baidu remaining dominant there.
Search engines have had profound impacts economically, both good and bad. Building up new industries while gutting others. They have helped with cultural preservation, while in some ways leading to digital colonialism. Search engines are like any technology, they are not neutral and they have unintended consequences.
The reality is, search engines are profoundly important and vital to our societies around the world. A key interface between our physical and digital worlds.
And now we are about to add to this mix, Answer Engines. We see this in early forms today such as with Perplexity.ai and Copilot in Bing with Gemini in Google. We are likely to see it, in some form with the Apple’s approach to AI through Apple Intelligence.
Answer engines are designed to give short, but detailed answers, not just serving up links with snippets of text content designed to game for rankings. This will have another level of impact on societies. But that’s for another article.
One thing is for certain, humans are a curious lot, always learning, exploring and discovering, innovating and, for the most part, advancing. Search is here to stay. Digitally and physically.