Second Index
Description
Felix Stalder:
"This problem is compounded by the fact that the actual customers of the search engines, the advertisers, are not interested in the topology of the network either, but in the individual users journeying through the network. These two forces, one intrinsic to the task of search engines themselves, the other intrinsic to what has become their dominant business model – advertising – drive the creation of the second index. This one is not about the world’s information, but about the world’s users of information. While the first one is based on publicly available information created by third parties, the second one is based on proprietary information created by the search engines themselves. By overlaying the two indexes the search engines hope to improve their core tasks: to deliver relevant search results to the users, and to deliver relevant users to advertisers. In the process, search engines create a new model of how to organize the world’s information, a model composed of two self-referential worlds: one operating on the collective level – one world emerging from the interactions of everyone (at least in its ideal version) – and the other operating on the individual level – one’s world as emerging from one’s individual history. Both of these levels are highly dynamic and by interrelating them, search engines aim to overcome the problem of information overload (too much irrelevant information), which both users and customers constantly encounter, the former when being presented with hundreds of “hits” while looking for just a handful (maybe even just one), the latter when having to relate to a mass of people who don’t care, rather than just a few prospective customers."