ABSTRACT
Google is a private, for-profit corporation. From its founding, Google has focused on creating what Zimmer (2007) characterizes as the perfect search. The perfect search is what Google's cofounder, Lawrence "Larry" Page, describes as seeking to understand exactly what one mean and give back exactly what the people want. Google, like all search engines, has a Web crawler that collects all the information it can about the accessible sites on the Web, an index that structures the crawler-collected data, and a query processor that matches user queries to the index. Google presents itself and shapes its public image as something quite different from a data collection operation. Google's highly touted yet unofficial motto is do not be evil, a statement that implicitly distances Google from surveillance, which at the very least has negative connotations. Google's algorithms are key to its success as a business, so it cannot reveal them and hope to retain its position in Internet search.
