A while back I read John Battelle's The Search for a piece I was writing about Google. It introduced me to a particularly useful phrase, the "database of intentions", to describe Google's record of the searches people were asking it perform.
Put briefly: you see a search box on an uncluttered webpage; Google sees millions of requests coming in from across the globe. It knows what you want from the internet because you tell it.
The Bush administration, as court papers lodged in San Jose have revealed, now wants Google to hand over a week's worth of this database to help it build up a profile of internet use in order to uphold laws against child pornography.
The court papers said it did not want information that would link individuals to searches (which would have created huge huge privacy concerns) but Google refused. Its lawyer said it could not accept the perception that Google was "willing to reveal information about those who use its services."
Other search engines agreed to the request - Yahoo! said it did not see it as a privacy issue - but Google does appear to have lived up to its pledge not to be evil. It is, of course, more complicated than that: the records are commercially sensitive, then there is the issue about whether child abuse is the greater evil (and the practicallity of the Bush administration plan to use search data in its bid to prosecute it).
But the precedent that Google is not going to hand over data is a strong one because it is precisely the kind of thing that privacy campaigners have been worrying that it will do. Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum, told the Associated Press it should remind people that seach engines had memories: "when you are looking at that blank search box, you should remember that what you fill can come back to haunt you."
Battelle first realised the power of the search record when he encountered Google Zeitgeist, the monthly hit parade of increasing and decreasing searches. He said it then struck him that "Google had more than its finger on the pulse of our culture, it was directly jacked into the culture's nervous system."
This was my first glimpse into what I came to call the database of intentions - a living artifact of immense power. My God, I thought, Google knows what our culture wants! Given the millions upon millions of queries streaming into its servers each hour, it seemed to me that the company was sitting on a gold mine of information. Entire publishing businesses could be created from the traces of intent evident in such a database.
But he realised that governments and law enforcement agencies would also be interested.
This reality raises interesting questions about privacy, security and our relationship to government and corporations ... The bargain is this: we trust you not to do evil things with our information ... that's a pretty large helping of trust we're asking companies to ladle onto their corporate plate. And I'm not sure either we or they are entirely sure what to do with the implications of such a transfer. Just thinking about these implications makes a reasonable person's head hurt.
Battelle is blogging on the latest developments; Searchenginewatch is posting regular updates; and BoingBoing has news of other search engines supplying search information.
