Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION This is a book about search. It is concerned with how search, searching, and with them search engines have become so widely used that we have stopped noticing them. It is thus more accurately a book about invisible search. One of society’s key infrastructures for knowing and becoming informed is computerised systems sup- porting the search for and locating of documents and information. The use of these systems, search engines, is curiously dispersed and centralised at the same time. It is dispersed across a vast array of social practices in which it has acquired close to nat- uralised positions (Hillis et al. 2013), while it is commercially and technically centralised and controlled by a handful of very dominant companies, especially one extremely powerful global player, Google. In the course of this, we can call it double movement, search has all but vanished from sight. Invisibility is often highlighted as one of the key features of an infrastructure (Star 1999) and clearly, in this sense it is safe to say that search engines are a fundamental information infrastructure. Yet, what does that mean more specifically? How do people deal with search engines? How do we research their use and which strands of previous research help us understand this all-encompassing, increasingly invisible information infrastructure? With digital tools now permeating most aspects of society, the use of search engines has become integral to everyday life on many levels. Searching for recipes or the bus timetable, for medical advice, for old neighbourhood photos or the weather report, searching for work-related documents, legal guidance or for the whereabouts of former colleagues, all this is done instantaneously on the same interface and using the same devices, thus inscribing itself into various parts of life. Search permeates myriads of social practices and everyday life at all levels, but it often remains invisible. It appears to be simple and is done effortlessly. Yet, this effortless simplicity with which online search intersects with everyday life in so many different situations conceals an astounding complexity. Accordingly, various strands of research traditions have for a long time been dealing with different 2 Introduction aspects of search and search engines. In fact, an entire set of considerations comes to the fore relating to issues such as the ways in which social practices are integrated with technology, with understanding what information might be and do in a certain situation, how to make sense of it in a specific context in relation to search technology, or in which ways to trust or question it. Furthermore, being searchable is today not only often seen as a feature of information, but information is also moulded to fit the shape provided by the tools used for searching for it, and, more often than not, this is a web search engine (Gillespie 2017; Haider 2014; Kallinikos et al. 2010). Inversely, this also means that information that is not pro- duced in conformity with the rules laid down by dominant search engines gets buried and is made less visible (Mulligan & Griffin 2018, pp. 569–570). Ultimately this – we can call it search-ification – of everyday life relates to the ways in which an increasingly invisible information infrastructure is entangled across culture and its practices and to what means we have at our disposal for understanding and making sense of these entanglements (see also Sundin et al. 2017). To look for, find, or retrieve information has always been one of the central concerns of libraries, as for information science, and at least since the 1940s and 1950s information science has been concerned with search in computerised systems more specifically. In a narrow sense and when the focus is on technical systems, the field is called information retrieval. In a broader sense and with a focus on people, it is often referred to as information behaviour. More colloquially, talk is of (online) searching or searching for information. Accordingly, these days society’s most important information retrieval systems are simply called search engines. Looking for mediated information is mostly done online and arbitrated by the various tools and devices that people carry with them on a daily basis. In addition, various algorithms and not least economic interests organise search. This way, search engines contribute to structuring private as much as professional lives and public and personal memories in ways that might not be immediately obvious. This search-ification of everyday life is also connected to the fact that contemporary general-purpose web search engines are by most measures easy to use and return in most cases results that are experienced as useful. What used to be complicated-to-use information retrieval systems, integrated with expensive (for users) databases designed for specific professional groups and frequently queried by information professionals or librarians, have for many turned into an unassuming query box or are integrated into a mobile phone by voice recognition via virtual personal assistants. Full-text searches across an enormous and ever-growing index are carried out at a speed that makes them appear to be almost instantaneous. Neither professional education, knowledge of query languages, nor controlled vocabularies are needed to query a general-purpose web search engine and to do so in a way that is adequate for most purposes. No subscriptions are required to use them. In fact, they are increasingly seen to replace specialised retrieval systems or these have begun to emulate general-purpose search engines in order to appear user-friendly. As using search engines and doing so proficiently became feasible for the general public, searching became not only inserted into all kinds of social Introduction 3 practices, but was also de-professionalised. We propose to call this the mundane-ification of search (Sundin et al. 2017). Using search engines is now just another ordinary activity, hard to discern and increasingly difficult to study and also teach. This is not least due to the way that the technical workings of the system have become increasingly opaque to users the simpler to use a search engine appears. This is amplified by the fact that control over this crucial information infrastructure is in the hands of commercial organisa- tions whose business model is based on their having full control over their index (database), their algorithms and their user data and whose “core unit of exchange” is traffic (van Couvering 2008, p. 177). Everyday life and social practices This book is framed around the notion of everyday life. A focus on everyday life is quite common in order to subsume all kinds of practices, behaviours, and periods that are not related either to education or the workplace. Obviously, this can per- tain to extremely different situations and thus play out differently when related to search. Everyday life is a fundamentally temporal notion (Adam 1995). Its emer- gence and meaning is closely connected to industrialisation and to the structuring of production in capitalist society and in particular of the welfare state (Nowotny 1994). Everything is tightly structured, negotiated, and controlled by the rules of the market and of work, in terms of holidays, protected working time per week or day, shifts, overlay time, weekends, and so on. The advent of the notion of everyday life is also part of a shift from a focus on production to one on consumption, which makes possible and also requires non-working time con- ceptualised as leisure time or quality time and importantly also as time for consumption. Only when we think of time as something that can be subject to commodification, which it is in capitalist society, does the concept of everyday life make sense. “Everyday life has become the bracket combining work and so-called free time; the private ‘spending of time’ and the public spending form a new combination in everyday life”, writes Helga Nowotny (1994, p. 103) and she continues: “The great public institutions of the state and the economy, and their temporal perspectives, are confronted with the temporal perspectives of the citizens and employees, the economic subjects”. In information science, time is an under- theorised notion and Reijo Savolainen called already in 2006 (p. 124) for the “need to develop a research agenda in order to approach the temporal issues of information seeking more systematically”. Search engines are one of today’s most important information and communication technologies and clearly their enormous presence has implications not only for how we think of time but also for how we think, experience, and practice time. Talking of different temporal perspectives that meet and collide, opens up for an understanding of everyday life that is more attuned to the intermingling of different structures of control, of various allegiances and demands than to a pre- dominantly chronological notion, where one period follows after the other. 4 Introduction Rather, the illusive concept of everyday life can be understood as something that is part of all life in different ways and not necessarily clearly distinguished from that which is “not everyday life”. We can think of it as reaching into situations and periods of, for instance, work or education or participation in civic life. Helga Nowotny (1994) talks of the increasing blurring of the boundaries between public and private time in the phenomenon of everyday life. Interestingly for our inves- tigation, she also identifies a related change in human perceptions of time that she discusses in relation to the ubiquity and dominance of communication technology in contemporary society. While work is sometimes conceptually distinct from everyday life as its negative and defining anti-thesis, it is also part of people’s everyday life in a more common-sense understanding.

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