John Battelle on the Future of Online Search

John Battelle who recently released a new book, Search and was recently interviewed on CNN in which he had the following concerns:

JB: This is in the case of some of the tools now that Google and others give you, called the tool bar, which watches everywhere you go. And why they do that is that so they know everywhere you've been on the Internet so they can give you better search. "Oh, I see, he's been to this site before, so perhaps I should make that site higher in the results." That's called personalized search.

It seems like a service to you, right? But all the information about where you've been doesn't live with you, nor do you control it nor can you control who has access to it because of course the government or Google itself -- or it doesn't necessarily have to be Google, it could be Microsoft or Yahoo or anyone else -- could do whatever they like with it without telling you. In fact, it's part of their privacy policy that they will not sell this, they will not give it to third parties unless the laws of that country require them to.

Now we've seen the laws of various countries and the law of China is very different from the law of Britain and very different from the law of the United States. In fact, the law of the United States is a lot more like China. It turns out that after 9/11 we've passed a law called the Patriot Act which
gives the government right to riffle through all of our stuff on line without our knowledge, which frankly as a journalist terrifies me. Not that I don't think we should have tools to combat terrorism -- I do. I just think we need a little sunlight.

We are creating these vast records of everything we do. It's very difficult to pull those records together and make sense of them but that's exactly what Google's job is. That's why they are in business. Are they doing the work of a potentially corrupt or abusive government? Yes, you can't deny that they are. The question is will they make a stand against it at some point and/or will they make it transparent to me so I can see what they know about me and I can edit it or decide that I wish to become anonymous.

Feeling a little nervous about the potential Google and government partnership? Google can already control what advertisements that I see through tags with my searches which is so flawless that most consumers are not even aware that they are being herded in cyberspace. My question if they can do it with advertising, what is stopping them from doing this with searches that prevent me from seeing information that may prove helpful to my research or my autistic son. Will Google herd me to somewhere else that may be related to my search but not where I ultimately may want to go?

Battelle makes some interesting predictions for 2006. Battelle feels that there will be some major lawsuits involving the protection of data files on the private citizens as well as the Web 2.0 will be a major focus.