Nobody likes to search.
Most of us do like to find the thing we want search to bring us. But we’re losing the capacity to imagine what that is. To search is becoming as automated as our credit card details. Every time we let a search engine company fill in the blanks or complete our thoughts, we’re substituting a machine-determined way to deliver us to an unidentified influencers. Some are advertisers. Others want us to buy their arguments or to act on impulses triggered by their own unadvertised agendas.
Like anything else, search is mainly what you put into it. Letting the algorithm finish your query and you get the equivalent of garbage in, garbage out, no matter how alluring that sure first answer may be. And guess what? They’re everyone else’s results too! That’s a challenge for most of us.
But it’s an even bigger problem for researchers determined to be the masters of their own evidence-gathering. How do we wrest control away from the search engine companies? How do we prove to clients that we can find the stuff they can’t and connect the loose-ends of our research into cogent explanations and case narratives?
We need to reverse the dialog between person and machine so that we’re acting on our own behalf. That means using search tools designed to impose our laser focus in digital investigations. Oh, by the way: They’re the same tools that disable the algorithms that shadow us across the web. That’s when we find our independent voice.
When we’re no longer prompted with the same auto-completes of the search engine? That’s when we’re searching out loud.
