The Google Blog recently published an interesting post that contextualizes the media hype surrounding Michael Jackson’s death against the terms the world was searching for in the Google index on June 25, the day he passed away. R.J. Pittman, Google’s director of Project Management (but ostensibly one of his employees) notes that the demand for information about Jackson and his death was so sudden that “Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a “We’re sorry” page before finding the articles they were looking for.” The post’s accompanying graph, which shows how searches for MJ dramatically spiked in about thirty minutes, is an interesting way to see how quickly we wanted information on the King of Pop.

The Google Blog’s post also provides a link to their Hot Trends for June 25. Pittman shows this page so we can see just how often the Google index was searched with a phrase such as “michael jackson rushed to hospital.” I particularly like the fact that the second-most popular search for the day is “michael jackson dead 2009” – showing that when it comes to celebrity deaths, many of us hold to the saying, “once bitten, twice shy”.

But what’s more interesting, I think is, is the number of Michael Jackson-related phrases that made it to the top 100. 26 of the 100 most popular searches on June 25 were directly related to Michael Jackson and 6 more were directly related to Los Angeles-based media. Dozens more made requests for other news outlets, as well. Pittman doesn’t tell us in this post exactly how many times information was requested on MJ, but that fact that 26 different permutations of the subject made for the most popular retrievals of the day calls to mind how important the Google-verse has become to ready reference. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since it reveals just how adept this search engine has become at retrieving useful data.

Search Trends on the death of Michael Jackson, June 25, 2009 (my markup)

But at the same time, it reminds me of the difficulties we (scholars and professionals) have when contending with the giant Googlebot. Google really can be everything to everyone sometimes, but this can blur the boundaries between what might be useful and what might be peripheral to a student’s research. At the time that the world was demanding their MJ fix through Google, I was putting the finishing touches on some library materials to help teach students how to access scholarly materials via Google Scholar and Google Books. And now, after contemplating the Hot Trends page this evening, I’m finding it difficult to reconcile the fact that I can help some one to create an effective Google search strategy for post-human feminism and sci-fi film by using the same search box they used to search “jeff goldblum is watching you poop” (no. 68 on the Hot Trends list, above).

That’s not to say that Google is bad or that popular culture is bad – I love both. But perhaps it highlights the need for information professionals to show people how to wade through all the flotsam and jetsam that exists out there in the Internet. Google and other indexes may have brought the world to our fingertips, but we could all use a little help organizing it and determining its utility.

Here’s a little something think about and e-mail to all of your friends of neighbours over the next few days. June 2009, you will recall, has the unfortunate pleasure of marking the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Uprising. Many people were hurt, killed, and repressed. But, as a good friend noted when he forwarded me this article, many more today don’t even realize it happened or just consider it only a tiny blip on the way to domestic prosperity. Mirroring this sentiment is a post that a user at LIS News made that links to Frontline’s 2006 exposé on Google’s self-censorship on keyword searches on Google.cn.  This page is a stirring reminder that Google’s mantra of “Don’t be evil” is often lost in translation or subordinated to a footnote in a corporate annual report.

Looking at the screenshots that Frontline made in 2006 is a good way to put our love for Google in check. So many of us (and I count myself in this bunch) are inextricably tired to various Google products and apps, from its powerful index and search engine to its free e-mail service and RSS reader. Google makes the Internet so easy to work with that we hardly notice the tidy profit they make from our love for their wares. Yet, when we are given a chance to take a serious look at what Google does to its own index of the Internet so that it may increase its market share in foreign or closed markets, we can see clearly that Google and “Don’t be evil” aren’t tied to the hip like we like to believe they are.

I’m not going to cut-and-paste Frontline’s images into this post because I think it’s important that you visit the Frontline website for yourself – continued traffic will hopefully give them pause to keep this page up for a rather long time. When you do make it there, however, I’m confident you’ll be at least a tiny bit shocked to see firsthand what Google sacrificed in order to enter the domestic Chinese market. Self-censorship has become key to the Google business model in China. Searching for “Tiananmen Square” in Google’s image database from a café in Chengdu won’t retrieve links to the ubiquitous photo of the anonymous student who confronted a column of tanks as it would in Toronto, London or Rome but will rather show warm photos of the tourist site. Meanwhile, searching for “Falun Dafa” will not return a single hit. In order to maintain a place in the Chinese market, Google restricts access to its database and sees higher ad rates and click-throughs (and presumably a healthier bottom line) in the long run.

That’s the problem with Google and “Don’t be evil.” Sitting in our offices and cozy living rooms and dens and bedrooms here in the West, we don’t notice that Google has self-censored and altered access to its index. We hear about this from time to time, but it hardly affects us, so we tend to forget about it. Google China’s practices isn’t doing any harm to you or I, and they’re certainly not doing any harm to its shareholders’ ROI, but they are actively restricting the type of information that can be retrieved for millions of Internet users on the other side of world.

This is perhaps one of the largest reminders we have that corporate interests are not always aligned with the interests of the people. Think for a second who controls the way you access information on the Internet, from your local service providers to search engines to backbone consortia. The Internet isn’t free and Google isn’t benevolent. Remember that the next time you might look for something controversial in an index.

At the ETIG pre-conference camp at CLA 2009, a couple people suggested that what the library world needs right now is something like Google’s 80/20 time to kindle and kick-start all of our imaginations onto new and wonderful projects. It’s hard to be against such a proposal and frankly, I’d love to see it done in any workplace I do (or will) set foot in. 80/20 time would be a boon to any organization, be it library science or googlizing the world – sign me up and count me in.

I’ve been giving some thought to how 80/20 time could meaningfully work, though. A friend of mine works – in spirit, if not in hours – in an 80/20 labour situation. He decided to take on an MPA while holding down his full-time position. To facilitate this, he played around with the length of his lunches and the time that his days began in order to ensure he always had Friday off to get some school work done. Three years later, he finished a two-year degree with a thesis in hand. That took a lot of hard work on his part, but since his organization was willing to bend, he came away with a lot more practical knowledge that has been useful to the workplace since.

Whether any 80/20 time would be spent on professional development or on developing little side projects that might turn into bigger projects for the organization (e.g. like how the Gmail side-project turned Google from a simple search engine to a social gathering space), the logistics and the evaluation of the outcomes are outside the bounds of the everyday work experience. How does one plan for a certain number of individuals to accomplish new goals that on the surface might appear tertiary to the organization’s main focus, and then how does one judge the work when its complete? The former takes skills, knowledge, and experience in strategic planning and management, of course, but the latter requires faith on the part of leadership. Organizational leadership would have to sit back and understand that for the long-term health of the organization and its professionals that the side-projects would have to be allowed to both stumble and succeed over time. After all, one is going to get dirty when playing in a sandbox.

I don’t think a cynic could work with the concept of 80/20 time. If one is more likely to say “give a man an inch and he’ll take a mile” than, “teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for life” (*), then the thought of giving staff time to work on their own projects might not ever work out. 80/20 – in any organization – requires a healthy dose of faith and optimism on the part of the leadership for it to succeed.

(* – I know the metaphors don’t match. My point is that for 80/20 to work, a certain amount of time and labour-hours must be freely given to the staff. There can’t be reservations about this, and it must be given with excitement for what the time might bring to all involved.)