Eating Google

Feasting on 76 days of indigestible privacy policy and social credit scoring

“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” – Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

In December 2021, I published an article about a day in the life of a Google algorithm. At the time, the search terms generating the most hits were “porn” with 4.16 billion and “Covid-19” at 3.75 billion. Today, with Covid lockdowns over, porn has slipped to 3.9 billion while the celebrity virus produces 9.9 billion results, a 264% increase.

“Kyle Rittenhouse” had already dropped from over 100 million hits the day after his trial verdict to less than 60 million. I averred that he would fade to algorithmic irrelevance within a year. Today, he generates 2.3 million results.

What does this fun-house mirror effect mean beyond diversion or geeky technical analysis?