Surfing, Browsing, Scrolling, Crawling: Web Search and Digital Discovery

Location

This week we’ll meet at Google, [logistics here!], at 4pm with Alexis Lloyd, Senior Director, Google; Melissa Falconett, Principal Director of UX for GoogleSearch; our own Karly Wildenhaus, Manager of Metadata Services at the NYPL; and Sam Lavigne, Artist and Parsons Faculty Member. Please bring a government-issued ID to access the building.  

Agenda

We’ll think about whether and how we might apply the cartographic legacies and modes of discovery we addressed in previous weeks to the digital realm. Our exploration will extend from the evolution of search engines, particularly as they’ve responded to new techniques and technologies (like SEO and AI); to the disparate (but perhaps ever-more-aligned, for better or worse) goals informing commercial web search and library discovery tools; to speculative, activist, and poetic digital discovery tools.

To Prepare for Today

(Sorry — this is an ambitious list! I couldn’t help myself! Feel free to skim 😉)

• How did we ever find stuff before the Internet?!? Recall our earlier discussion of reference resources! Think about indexes and card catalogs and other bibliographic and infrastructural scaffolds, too! 🙂 Now, read Anton Tantner, “Before Google: A Pre-History of Search Engines in Analogue Times” in René König and Miriam Rasch, eds., Society of the Query: Reflections on Web Search, INC Reader 9(Institute of Networked Cultures, 2014): 122-38; and skim the book’s table of contents to see what critical questions other scholars raised about web search in 2014. How might we update those questions for 2026?  
  • See, too, the INC’s list of search engines. 
• Let’s now consider the commercial search tool so ubiquitous and naturalized it’s become a generic verb: Read Google’s brief “In Depth Guide to How Google Search Works,” watch Toluse Akinlabi, “The Evolution of Search: Drive Growth & Efficiency,” Google Ads (October 15, 2025) [video: 20:35], and consider whose interests have been prioritized, and what values have been centered, throughout the tool’s evolution. 
• Why is it now so much harder to find what we’re looking for online? Web rot, search engine optimization, AI slop, AI summaries and the decline of “click-through traffic” are among the forces contributing to search’s devolution. Read Emanuel Maiburg, “Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain,” 404 Media (July 23, 2025); pdf here [thanks, Karly!]. If you’re not already familiar, 404 Media is a worker-owned critical tech publication! 
• Now, let’s explore library discovery tools and consider how their purposes might differ from — but their UX might be shaped by — commercial search engines. Read Monica Westlin, “Ingenious Librarians,” Aeon (June 5, 2023) and Ruth Kitchin Tillman, “Introducing Discovery Systems” (October 5, 2022). 
  • Optional: Consider alternative Latin American genealogies of information search: Read Rodrigo Ochigame, “Informatics of the Oppressed,” Logic(s) 11 (August 2020).  
• How have vendor politics and AI transformed (and compromised) library discovery and labor? Read Mike Olson, “Beyond Classification: The Human Cost of Library and Information Labor Under Digital Capitalism,” Scholarly Kitchen (August 26, 2025).
• Let’s consider some (perhaps unreplicable and unscalable) library alternatives: Skim the Library of Congress’s “Experimental Access to Digital Collections and Data: Final Report: Project Overview, Findings, and Recommendations” (March 2022), and check out the LoC’s Experimental Access tools. 
  • Optional: See also the work of the much-beloved-but-now-defunct NYPL Labs: Matt Miller, “The Networked Catalog,” NYPL Blogs (July 31, 2014); the NYC SpaceTime Directory (which has evolved into AllMaps); and my conversation with former NYPL Labs Director Ben Vershbow: “Urban Memory Infrastructure,” Urban Omnibus (March 1, 2017). 
• Finally, let’s consider some speculative, activist, and poetic alternatives.
  • Read Elan Ullendorff, “Folk Search Engines,” Escape the Algorithm (February 20, 2024) and explore his website! 
  • Skim through Feminist Search Tools. 
  • Read about Are.na in “Charles Broskoski on Self-discovery That Happens Upon Revisiting Things You’ve Accumulated Over Time,” The Creative Independent (October 15, 2017).  
  • Explore the work of Sam Lavigne.