The problem has its roots in the American service mentality. One could presumably imagine Google as a somewhat overzealous assistant. "Rest your fingers," says the friendly search engine provider. Right from the very first letter that we type in the search box, it rushes to guess what we might be looking for. "S." Is it SPIEGEL? Samsung? Savings and loan? Skype?
It's pure service-mindedness, but for Bettina Wulff it's a nightmare. The wife of former German President Christian Wulff wants the search engine to cease suggesting terms that she finds defamatory. This has nothing to do with the search results, but rather with the recommendations made by Google's "Autocomplete" function, a service that is also offered by competitors like Bing and Yahoo. All one has to do is type her first name and the first letter of her last name to get search suggestions such as "Bettina Wulff prostitute," "Bettina Wulff escort" and "Bettina Wulff red-light district."
Google acts as if all this were unavoidable. "The search terms in Google Autocomplete reflect the actual search terms of all users," says a company spokesman. He also spoke of the "algorithmic result of several objective factors, including the popularity of search terms," which sounds far more complex and typically vague, but basically amounts to the same shoulder-shrugging response: One cannot accuse an automatic mechanism of defamation. The company maintains that the search engine only shows what exists. It's not its fault, argues Google, if someone doesn't like the computed results.
How We Perceive the World
Google increasingly influences how we perceive the world. What are we more afraid of? That behind the computing processes stands a merciless machine, or the opaque and arbitrary decisions of a large US corporation?
Both are to be feared and, in the case of Google, both come into play. Contrary to what the Google spokesman suggests, the displayed search terms are by no means solely based on objective calculations. And even if that were the case, just because the search engine means no harm, it doesn't mean that it does no harm. The Autocomplete function, the usefulness of which Google so guilelessly praises as a means of giving one's fingers a rest, undeniably helps spread rumors. Assuming that someone unsuspectingly begins to look for information on "Bettina Wulff" and is offered "prostitute," "Hanover" and "dress" as additional search terms -- where, independent of their actual interests, will users most likely click?
And everyone who selects the most exciting suggestion adds to the popularity of this search, and thus increases the probability that others will see this suggestion in the future.
Perhaps this is one reason why we find these functions and their algorithms so unsettling -- because they so relentlessly expose human behavior. Google is a rumormonger for the simple reason that people are rumormongers. When we hear that there is a rumor concerning Bettina Wulff, we want the details.
Diligently Searching
Who looked up these terms so diligently that they became popular enough to appear in the Autocomplete suggestion box in the first place? Indeed, such unsubstantiated rumors don't reach the top of the search list by merely surfacing on some obscure website in a dark corner of the Web. It may well have been the politicians and journalists who spread the false rumor that Ms. Wulff had been a prostitute -- a rumor she has vehemently denied.
For many months, they looked so hard and long for details on the Internet that the algorithms at Google and other search engines eventually concluded that it would be helpful to suggest the term "prostitute" to people who were looking for "Bettina Wulff" -- just as they recommend "iphone 5" to people who type in "iph."
Anyone who looks for "Angela Merkel" will, depending on their country location, be given "Zeuthen" as an additional search term. After pursuing the initial results here, they will find fairly skeptical news stories about the rumor that the chancellor supposedly wants to move to this town southeast of Berlin.
Until recently, anyone who followed the search suggestions on Bettina Wulff found no newspaper articles, no professional search results and no denials, only the rumor itself. Anyone with a little imagination -- and on the Internet there are certainly people who fall into this category -- could see a conspiracy in the deafening silence of the traditional media on a story that appeared to permeate the Web. The fact that the purported story was not being reported made the rumor even more plausible for those who were spreading it.
A Tacit Agreement Not to Report
In fact, there was apparently a tacit agreement among journalists not to report on the rumor, despite the fact that so many people had heard it. Even critical reporting aimed at refuting the rumor was off-limits, no doubt due to concerns that Ms. Wulff would take legal action against the publishers.
This case shows how dangerous it can be in th