The politics of organizing information on the web

This paper is an exploration of the methodologies, economics and politics of organizing information on the web, through a historical-comparative analysis of Google. The paper centres on two cases that reveal interesting tensions in contemporary attempts at organizing knowledge and information. The first case deals with natural and artificial languages as tools for knowledge, working with the historical case of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his interest in a universal language as well as his pioneering contributions to etymology. The second case looks at the dialectics of centralization and decentralization as illustrated by the early 20-century project of bibliographer Paul Otlet. Together they are used to evaluate Google’s utilization of techniques from computer science to extract knowledge from search queries and unstructured web-data, both of which are stored and indexed in Google’s computing centres. In the concluding parts of the paper this is considered from the perspective of “audience production”. In the case of Google everything users do on the web is potentially of economic value for the company. E-mails, search queries and web-pages are raw materials that can be mined in order to reveal information of our most private longings: the intentions, desires and interiors of human users.