What our search history says about us

GOOGLE IS THE nickname of a close friend’s son. He is nine years old— that makes him younger than Google Inc. He was born in Stanford, a few months after the publication of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake. When we came to know about his christening, we put it down to two things—the first was his having been born in Palo Alto, with its Google connection; the other we thought of as an appropriate next generational writing back to Lahiri’s ‘Gogol’, for with a software engineer father (instead of Lahiri’s storybookperfect librarian dad), it was only right that ‘Google’, and not ‘Gogol’, be the name of the non-resident child. It made sense to be Google than Gogol in early 21st century America. Every time I see him, I am reminded of Neil Gaiman’s song I Google you: I Google you late at night when I don’t know what to do …. I Google you Whenever I’m alone and feeling blue … The emotions are not surprising, being part of the ancient ‘search’ motif as they are, the search for the lover or the search for the ‘nameplace- animal-thing’. What is new is the methodology of course, the snooping and stalking going hi-tech, but what is most interesting is this reliance on a search engine to play the role of neighbourhood aunt, dating agency, investigator and shrink, especially the last. For that one ‘search result’ is what one is looking for: the name of the lover, with only some new details added on, a new job, a new address perhaps, but hopefully not a new lover. Until then there is hope—inside the computer, even if not in the sweaty life outside it. Almost as a kind of grass-on-theother- side relief, there Mel Nichols’s poem I Google Myself: I Google myself I want you to love me When I feel down I want you to Google me …. I don’t Google anybody else At home alone in the middle of the night I Google myself We should all be honest enough to confess that we have been guilty of both–googling our names and those of our lovers. To google one’s name is a bit like a child shouting in the hollow dark—it’s a need for reassurance of our existence. To not be a ‘search result’ on Google is an existential crisis. Some days I feel sad for my grandparents—that I cannot show my love for them by typing their names in the Google search engine. Then I have the sense of them actually being lost to me forever, a double death, their irrecoverability even as a ‘search result’. It is hard to believe in the emotional investment in such an action, but anyone who has been greeted with ‘no matches found’ to a Google search report would know what I mean. I ask my cousin, the resident troubleshooter of our technologychallenged family, about the seemingly neutral algorithm of Google search results. Does it mean that our dead grandmother means nothing to the world because she wasn’t famous enough? I ask, envying imagined people with famous grandmothers. Troy, my cousin, tells me that no search result on Google is ever neutral—it carries the baggage of our ‘search history’. I am worried, counting back to all the naughty words I’ve fed my search engine. Is that why my grandmother refused to turn up in my Google search? I also want to tell Troy about the many times I’ve typed ‘I hate ...’, the name of a current dislike, usually a superior in the workplace, but I hold myself back. In that penitent mood, I ask him if there was redemption, if all my search-sins could be washed away. The sad truth is that as in life outside Google, the adage ‘as we sow, so we reap’ holds true. For Google search, we are an assemblage of our search options. ‘I’m feeling lucky’ is a version of the comradely high-five, that great minds, like Google’s and yours, can sometimes think alike. There were things I learnt about how this search operation works: Google works for us by using a mechanism called ‘crawling’ which means the links we follow from page to page. So while our fingers get some exercise on the keyboard, poor Google is ‘crawling’ to get info-food to our table. How Google gets us back to our self—‘type your name and press enter’—is enabled by things that have erotic names like ‘String Theory’ and martial arts for the brains like ‘Algorithm’. The Search Lab—which is a bit like our kitchen, but with more than 200 ingredients that goes into every recipe, only here the cooking takes 1/8th of a second, works to restore you back to yourself, without spam. All this to satisfy your urge to that overwhelming question: Who am I? For Gareth Thomas’s The Google Song has these lines: I wondered what was where And what I was doing here At night I googled up my name I watched my name roll down the page From 1000 different towns and places And not one of me was the same There’s a banker and some CEO And some writer on some radio A broker and a baker And a booker and some barrister too Then my fears were growing active These other me’s were quite attractive But one thing didn’t ring true They don’t have you The song carries a generation’s insecurities: “Then my fears were growing active/These other me’s were quite attractive”, what most of us, with the exception of Barack Obama and Salman Rushdie, must have felt at some time or the other after a selfgoogle search. What saves the day is love: ‘They don’t have you’. There is a Tamil Google song as well. It’s from the film Thupakki. But in the song, the primacy of Google is challenged. Google told me that you are the most beautiful woman in the world, sings the man. Yahoo told me that no one’s quite mad like you, replied the woman. In this duel, there are other entrants too: ebay and Youtube too, all props in their repartee. I still don’t quite understand the relation between Google and love. What does it say about our cultural history of emotions that we invest an internet search engine with romantic love? There is something else that these poems and songs share in common: it is the invocation of the Google Search Engine at night. Is it loneliness alone, abetted by a neighbouring darkness that makes people play a digital version of ‘Search Me’? Someday, I will feel lucky. And then I will discover the answer perhaps. Am I not worth any human love at all if I am not a Google search result?