The question of the “smartness” of Google is a tough one. I just wish there were a way to better differentiate between its use as a tool to help one find things, and its power as a curator/mapper to order the world. I think that for too many people, the paradigm example of a search is looking for something they already know about. Just because a search engine accurately “maps” or leads you to that does not guarantee that it escapes bias elsewhere.

The painter/paint metaphor also can’t hope to capture the myriad ways that Google orders information. It’s acting as a credit reporter, a background checker, a spam filter, a social network, a phone book, a map service, a scholarly citation service–I could go on and on. To the extent that reliable competitors exist in each of these areas, its power is not a great concern. But if it comes to gradually insinuate itself into the operations of most such competitors, it raises grave concerns.

First, in its relation to other peoples’ content, Google’s role is more like a collector or curator of other people’s paintings. Each of the search results returned by Google is itself a painting, in terms of being content (often protected, occasionally public domain). Paint per se, on the other hand, is not content.

In the second paragraph, the emphasis is on Google’s amassing a database of its users’ interests. If the paint metaphor is apt here at all, it should apply to the user search requests (and perhaps click-throughs), not to the content per se that users are seeking.

The confusion between content and user searches seems also to underlie the parasite metaphor and the meaning of “Google’s value”. Value to whom?

Value to the user? Maybe I do benefit at times from Google’s smartness dervived from other peoples’ searches (as opposed to those smart human coders Google used to brag about in its early days). But at other times it surely doesn’t benefit me: it’s often led to distractions from what I’m really seeking. To say nothing of the fact that search results are distorted by advertising (though perhaps this just means Google also gets “smarter” when paid). So I count the benefits to me of this third-party-derived intelligence a wash at best.

Value to Google? This is more plausible, since Google’s business is advertising and selling user data. But in this case, the parasite argument goes more to Google’s appropriation of its users’ search information (and privacy), rather than of the content.