(in order to understand the endless remaking of the past in the name of progress)

The significance of search engines and encyclopedias may be too obvious for heavy Internet users. Still why and how they are important to academia needs more justification.

The issue of temporal significance is highlighted most frequently when the following questions are raised: “What if Google no longer dominates the search engine market?” “What if Wikipedia projects ceases to exist?” Then the obvious question follows: “Why bother studying them for historical and political implications?” “Are they just like another hit songs of the year?” “Does they matter at all?”

For politics and history scholars, I now have the tentative answer ready for discussion. Exactly because nowadays the information comes and goes, because the valuable information today will become unwanted information bytes of ruin next year, it is all the important for us to understand how search engines and online encyclopedias has flashed out the most valuable information waiting to be recycled, archived, or just simply “updated” in forgetful Web. It is very possible that search engine and online encyclopedia may not exist after ten years or so (but my DPhil thesis may possibly stays in the Oxford library, if it is ever finished), but the value of my research should not rely on the existence of my research subjects, but rather rely on the current larger socio-historical context that we are in. I shall call it “search keyword and encyclopedia entry” project as Walter Benjamin studied shopping “Arcade” project. Sharing the similar philosophy of history, the project is not only about what the bits and pieces of information ruins can tell us about current situation, but also how the storm of progress is embodied in the artifacts of search engines and online encyclopedias.

Literally, it is a project based on the worldview that Internet is a continuous project of modernity as “the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent”(Baudelaire).

Indeed, the experience with search engines and online encyclopedias may be deceptively “ephemeral, fleeting, and contingent.” The same term may generate different search results and encyclopedia content on different days. They are moving targets. Costly to research. Shaky to make a solid argument. Seemingly pointless in generalizing.

Not so quick. As Hellsten et al. (2006) empirically shows how search engines “rewrite the past” by favoring updated information and thus forgetting the ruin of information within an endless updating cycles. This leads to a generally true statement:

Search engines remember (the new) and forget (the old).

Since search engines favor updated “new” information, the old must be re-plied, re-edited, re-used, re-linked, or even re-mixed in order to get attention. In user-generated environment, it is even truer. The old needs to be re-discovered and re-improved so that it will not be forgotten by search engines.

In this regards, online user-generated encyclopedias are favored by search engines with a good reason:

Search engines favors user-generated encyclopedias because of constant updating.

The incremental nature of wiki beats that of blogs here. Old blog entry become ruins, sometimes littered with spam links, further going downhills in the penalty of being ignored by search engines. Old wiki entry can become ruins as well, but a simple spell check or small correction by anyone in the content can restore its rankings in the attention span of search engines.

In addition, before the dreams of advanced semantic matching or image matching are realised, the clumsy keyword made of a string of symbols within/across langugage(s) still dominate the information ecology of search engines. Again, the encyclopedia organization nature beats other websites in keyword gaming in search results. The supposed-to-be-outdated indexical nature of encyclopedias (i.e. the title of entry) fit nicely into the keywords. The relationship between encyclopedia entry title and search keywords reminds us the connections between libraries catalogs, yellow books, dictionaries, etc. with the current search interface. This leads to the basic argument that I try to champion:

How a thing is termed in symbols (culturally and linguistically) influence the way search engines and encyclopedias organizes these terms and thus things.

Again, before the arrival of smooth and seamless connection of semantics (I wonder if that will ever happen), how we track, trace, and thus enable certain connections and/or infections between terms across communities, institutions, and nations is a necessary task in itself, in order to understand and capture the endless remaking of the past in the name of progress.