Report on the ‘Forum on Quaero’: 29 and 30 September, 2007
At the Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht (http://www.janvaneyck.nl)
Organized by Tsila Hassine, Vinca Kruk, Gon Zifroni, Daniel van der Velden

This is in no way a conclusive report. And it is far from an objective one at that; other reports on the Forum can be read
at Netzmedium: http://netzmedium.de/2007/10/02/questioning-quaero/
At Jodi Dean’s blog: http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2007/09/
At Open Search: http://www.open-search.net/Blog

Our aim with the ‘Forum on Quaero’ was to re-politicize the search engine. Search engines are constitutive of one of the most imporant ‘public spheres’ of the internet, yet their development and, most of all, their exploitation, is almost exclusively in the hands of private companies.
So, indeed, should the search engine field be left exclusively to the market – with all its invasive ways of gathering data from users, a potential surveillance tool in the hands of aggressive marketeers, private detectives and governments turning to ‘precrime’-related models of antiterrorism policing? Remarkably, search engines which differ from the hegemonic ones, Google and Yahoo, are grouped under the somewhat sad banner of ‘alternative search engines’ (sad, because their naming seems to accept they cannot be more than alternatives).
Should not, instead, democratic politics play a role in the development and application of search engines as public projects, and in the legal matters around them? And shouldn’t it be acknowledged that a ‘battle’ between two search engines not necessarily is fought on technological grounds – as in who makes the ‘best’ search engine – but also on political grounds (i.e. the development of a search engine can be the result of a political antagonism that cannot be understood in terms of market competition)? And, what is the potential of user-generated and peer-to-peer search engines in their effort to be resistant to both market and government, escaping the spectre of data surveillance imposed by central hosting servers, yet perhaps also guiding us away from the re-invention of public institutions?

In the words of Chantal Mouffe at the Dark Markets conference in Vienna in 2002: “I do not believe that there is a simple unequivocal answer to the question ‘do the new media have a democratizing potential?’ It is a complex question that can be approached from several angles and one of the crucial issues concerns: which is going to be the driving force in the development of the new technologies. Is their development going to be left to the markets (as it is the case today) or is it going to be checked trough political decisions informed by a democratic debate? It is clear that left to the markets, it is very unlikely that those new technologies will be oriented to the enhancement of democratic participation.’ (for an abstract, see http://darkmarkets.t0.or.at/materials/abstract_mouffe.htm)

The example to which we linked the abovementioned political issues was Quaero. When the Quaero project was launched in early 2005, we were offered a glimpse on a hitherto unthinkable endeavour: a state-funded search engine in the name of France and Europe. As, gradually, Quaero’s aims turned out to be quite different from those originally proclaimed, we however didn’t lose interest in it and thought it would be a good idea to organize a conference to further speculate on its initial promises: the ‘Forum on Quaero’.
With hindsight on what became a very inspiring conference and debate, we can now say that those initial questions were transformed and rephrased during the conference, in ways that neither of the participants seemed to have fully anticipated.

Prior to the conference, we (Vinca Kruk, Gon Zifroni, Tsila Hassine and myself) had been talking to a number of people whose work we regarded as highly relevant to the topics at hand. We spoke with Brian Holmes, Étienne Balibar, Frédéric Martel, Barbara Cassin, Ruedi Baur, Bureau d’Études, William Turner and Jean-Noël Jeanneney – all based in Paris. Jeanneney wrote the book ‘Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge’, or ‘Quand Google défie l’Europe’, directed expressly against the Google Books project. Jeanneney had strongly informed Jacques Chirac’s agenda when launching Quaero, and vice versa, Quaero was mentioned in Jeanneney's book. When in Paris we had, however, been unable to get in touch with Quaero’s directors. Written transcripts from the conversations were included in the publication handout at the Forum. Another text in that handout constitutes an e-mail exchange with the Quaero management itself. They contacted us with the question not to use the word ‘Quaero’ in the conference title, claiming that this would be misleading as the Forum was not endorsed by Quaero. After we changed the title to ‘Forum on Quaero’ (thereby preventing misunderstandings on the responsibility for the Forum), Quaero suggested a paradoxical ‘trade’: if the name Quaero would be omitted from the title, the managing director, Pieter van der Linden – who works for Thomson (http://ww.thomson.net) – and one of the leading programmers, Vincent Grelet – who works for Jouve (http://www.jouve.fr) – would be willing to lecture at the event (which Van der Linden said they considered highly relevant). If the name Quaero would be kept in the title, however, they would not show up. Either No Quaero, with Quaero, or Quaero, without Quaero. Joris van Hoboken, who replaced Koen Martens of Open Search as a speaker at the conference, spoke ironically about a ‘Forum without Quaero’.
We saw it as immensely important not to address the issues ‘in the abstract’, but to project them on/politicize a really existing institution whose name had become symbolic for many of the issues on the table. This is why we finally made the choice to keep ‘Quaero’ featured in the title. Consequently, Pieter van der Linden and Vincent Grelet did not participate in the Forum. I still haven’t sorted out exactly why. Does this mean that the Quaero consortium has gotten fundamentally out of touch with the awareness it has caused?

The first day was moderated by Florian Cramer. We had seen him in action earlier at DEAF07 ‘Interact or die’ in Rotterdam. Florian started with an example where misspelling the search query for ‘Tienanmen’ in Google China would enable the user to bypass the censorship and finding actual images of the events on Tienanmen Square, which in China are forbidden information.

- Michael Zimmer: Quaero’s quest for the perfect search engine; threats and opportunities
Michael Zimmer kicked off with an analysis of the quest for ‘perfection’ in search engines, resulting in a set of 8 demands on Quaero, based on his research on search engines and ethics, and the right to ‘privacy in public’. He elaborated on the uncanny http://www.riya.com, a search engine that uses face recognition technology allowing its users to tag faces in photographs with searchable data. Riya.com clearly taps into the vast amount of user-generated content in order to subject it to a series of instruments and tools which, from Zimmer’s angle, constitute a method of surveillance.
His first demand on Quaero was that the search engine, when asked for its user data, simply doesn’t have them, because it simply doesn’t record them (this is crucial and is linked to a feature later introduced by Opensearch, a peer2peer search engine). Michael Zimmer proposed to relaunch the phenomenon of ‘obscurity’ with regard to data. Search history should be editable and deletable by the user, and Quaero should not include personalized or behaviour-targeted advertising. By projecting the main elements from his PhD on the Quaero context, something like an initial ‘agenda’ emerged with regard to the ethics that search engines at present keep hidden from their users. Michael Zimmer’s full presentation can be found at http://www.michaelzimmer.org.

- Florian Schneider: Imaginary Property
Florian Schneider’s presentation focused on ‘imaging knowledge and imagining property’, border management and the management of new information regimes. ‘When we use a search engine we experience it as a machine that generates an image’, whereas the manufacturing process of that image is hidden and it includes a number of constraints. Currently, according to Schneider, search engines function on the condition of the aesthetics of their results, which brought him to the question of ‘imaginary property’: what does it mean to own an image? He proposed that the web 2.0 is based on the imagined revenues of user-generated content, whereas, crucially, the search engine functions as a kind of digital mirror stage (as in people Googling themselves). Florian Schneider in his talk posed the question of a European search engine as inexorably linked to the issues of migration and border management.

- Metahaven: Quaero Uncorporate
We have, in a talk split in two parts, first elaborated on the absence of a Quaero corporate presence and the curious fact that web users have started to create their own logos for Quaero based on the Google masthead. We have analyzed parallels in the logos of (on the surface very different) projects like the European Union, Google and Microsoft Windows. Note how the idea of full colour settings is used in logos for European integration, search engines, and operating systems alike, all of which are also, because of their inclusive diversity, implicitly symbolic of the crossing of territorial borders and boundaries. Europe as the territorial entity united in its diversity; the search engine as the all-encompassing tool for information used around the globe; and the Windows operating system as the environment that comes as a natural given with close to every PC sold in the world.
We propose a new typology for a Quaero search engine logo related to borders and territories, based on the ‘Q’, which is simultaneously a target. The 'Q' then translates into tree rings and the typology of the asteroid, into a more structural and architectural analogy, the phenomenon of ‘multipolar search’ and the shaping of the sign according to different ‘web forces’.

- Metahaven: Virtual territories, real borders
The second part of our talk focused on proposing new mapping models for the semantic ‘spheres’ of the internet which we think can be imaged not simply according to the well-known ‘nervous centre’ image of the web, but as a stacked series of ‘floors’, all of them nervous centres, forming semantic spheres interlinked mainly with themselves. Contemporary web practice gathers souls that rely on services such as MySpace, Technorati, Delicious, Facebook and Google (spheres) for the agency of human generated content. Although there exists some connectivity between those spheres, it is important to understand that they are in fact very different immaterial worlds that directly produce their own behaviour. The model proposes to layer the spheres on top of each other like floors in order to allow a more proportional ‘vertical’ search. Another prototype presented was a browser typology that filters out advertisements and leaves holes in web pages, instead. In this model, not the search engine but the browser would be advertisement-free which could influence, in turn, the behaviour of the search engine. Images and texts (soon) of our talk are available at http://www.metahaven.net.

- Tsila Hassine: Shmoogle and Tracer
Web artist activist and programmer Tsila Hassine, co-organizer of this conference, presented her sharp experiments with search engines in the form of two key projects: Shmoogle (online at http://www.shmoogle.org) and Quaero Tracer (http://logoparc.com/Quaero_tracer/). Shmoogle randomizes the order of results in a Google search and displays them all on a single page. It thus bypasses the page ranking hierarchy. An ironic comment on Google even in its upfront aesthetic, Hassine showed what a crafty web user and artist can do in practice to bypass the systems Google imposes on us. The second project, Quaero Tracer, is based on the more general ‘Tracer’ image search typology she developed together with the collective De Geuzen (http://www.geuzen.org/). The Image Tracer archives images, the url, the date of query, filename, status and rank. Quaero Tracer indeed is a machine for ‘imaging knowledge’ as it presents time as an inherent part of its model, creating ‘depth’. The curious effect of Tracer is that it detects cracks and bumps in the fluidity of web representation whereby we observe not just the dominance of certain images in relation to certain queries, but also the moments where these images disappear. By overlaying them with each other, something like a hieroglyph or narrative emerges.

- Ingmar Weber: an overview of (alternative) search engines
After Tsila’s presentation, Ingmar Weber went on into demonstrating a variety of technical models and setups for search engine; in fact, he quickly built one himself, live, tracking and caching information outward from the very nodal point of the Jan van Eyck Academie. Weber discussed desktop search engines, web crawlers and site mirroring tools, Google in China, meta-search engines, peer-to-peer search engines, the concept of user editable ranking and search engines with chat Interfaces and clustering interfaces. Ingmar Weber’s presentation references can be found on his web page at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne: http://ltaa.epfl.ch/~inweber/quaero_references.html

- Discussion
An audience member, Olga Elkaim, had proposed that we might need Quaero as a means to ‘question the question’. It was clear from the day’s presentations that instead of doomsday talk about Google’s global dominance, the critical mass gathered at the Forum was willing to think beyond the negative and formulate alternatives. The variety of perspectives, from legal, ethical, to political, to design, to technology, made Sabine Niederer, the first respondent, remark that ‘as of now, Quaero exists’.
She noted that the event had a strong ‘hope curve’ that went from Cramer’s Google China misspellings to Zimmer’s 8 demands to the critical design perspectives and the ad-free browser model.
Sabine Niederer’s blog can be found at http://www.niederer.info/new_site/
Maurits de Bruijn, the second respondent, asked the question whether we actually need another search engine. He suggested that the calculator is currently the model for most search engines - you put something in, you get something out. If search engines are machines (like engineers have built them so far, with the best intentions), there’s no need to build a new one. But a search engine, for Maurits de Bruijn, is not simply a machine – it’s a grand design. And then, does it make sense to build a new ‘European’ search engine? Yes, according to De Bruijn; we have always had European cinema as opposed to Hollywood. At this point he showed the poster of Top Gun as the central typology of Hollywood values. ‘We need as many alternatives as possible.’ Maurits de Bruijn at http://www.mauritsdebruijn.nl

The second day of the Forum on Quaero was moderated by Florian Schneider. The first talk on day two would pick up on notions that Florian had previously introduced – immaterial labour and user generated content – in an unexpected way.

- Bureau d’Études: Search engine of the living dead
Bureau d’Études had developed an elaborate map entitled ‘Infrastructure for European Cognitive Capitalism (from a Quaero perspective)’, where Quaero sits at the heart of a gloomy reference field that links it to technology, research labs, the French government and the defense industries. So far, classical Bureau d’Études. The feature that however bypassed the many of their earlier works was an emphasis on the supernatural, voodoo and magic. The notion of user generated content (where people devote their entire life to machines and networks, becoming, as the duo has it, ‘no life people’) leads Bureau d’Études to concepts like ‘industrial animism’, ‘Döppelgangers’ (traces of one’s identity on the web), a ‘living dead processor’ and the ‘exploitation of the living dead’. Knowledge management extended to the management of life and ideas, posing the Darwinian logic of ‘adapt or disappear’. Their central paradigmatic question – strictly black magic – was: ‘who is the heretic in today’s knowledge society?’ An question posed by Richard Rogers was dismissed (or evaded) by the artist duo. That question was: ‘Are your maps descriptive or explanatory?’

- Jodi Dean: Blogging as self-management under communicative capitalism
Jodi Dean, a professor of political philosophy, is herself a ferocious blogger. During the conference she was constantly blogging and in fact generating an incredibly high quality live coverage of the event as it happened. In her talk, a series of observations about blogs and search engines, she started from the notion of the obsolescence of the ‘home page’. Dean interpreted search engines, but especially blogs, as means to find one’s way in an ever more chaotic web, providing points of reference, accountability and trust. Based on algorithmic ranking, search engines promise an objective ordering of their findings. Blogs, on the other hand, act as anchor points because of their emphasis on an individual point of view – ‘managing distributed subjectivity’. I mentioned to Jodi Dean that blogs, from the reverse angle, can then be seen as a form of subjective alibi building: “Blogs provide pov (point of view), we can ‘trust’ this person (the blogger). This can only be said if the ‘trustworthy’ is juxtaposed to something else which is ‘not to be trusted’. So: are blogs intrinsically linked to an implicit notion of insecurity and mistrust? In other words, are blogs the ideal instrument for a post-911 ‘I’m ok, you’re ok’ collective self-control system in public? By stating exactly where we are, what we did, etc., are we building not subjectivities but alibis? It wasn’t me? An anticipation indeed on Bureau d’Études speculation of user generated content as a system of global control & precrime?”
The web address of Jodi Dean’s blog can be found at the head of this post.

- Richard Rogers: do politics have engines?
The following speaker, Richard Rogers, presented some of the empirical tools and benchmark tests he developed with his agency Govcom (http://www.govcom.org). Consequently Rogers was going to ask the questions whether search engines have politics and whether politics have engines? He showed what he called the first fully documented case of a site being removed from Google: the site of the 9/11 Truth Movement (http://www.911truth.org). Rogers’ research on the strange and unexplained disappearance of this massively visited site from the Google top ranking is to be found at his ‘Issue Dramaturg’: http://issuedramaturg.issuecrawler.net/
Although unrelated to Rogers’ research, the 9/11 Truth Movement’s own explanation for its disappearance from Google can be found at http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=2007092200814732
Rogers then continued with the question whether politics have engines; he exemplified this by the issue of the ‘climate change skeptics’ and the question if the ‘climate change skepticism’ issue is preferred, or denied, in a search engine- or medium-specific way. Rogers finds that ‘few skeptics appear on the web sites of the top ten results in Google, with little resonance. (…) One may evaluate sources according to the frequency with which each mentions the skeptics. There are skeptic-friendly sites, and less skeptic-friendly sites. (…) Remarkably, news sites, generally speaking, do not mention the climate change skeptics by name. Whilst news watchers and listeners may have the impression that 'uncertainty' in the climate change 'debate' continues in a general sense (as opposed to, say, in more specific, scientific sub-discussions), 'uncertainty' appears to be discussed without resort to the well-known, or identified, skeptics. who turn out to be more preferred by certain websites and search engines, while disregarded by other.’
This research can be found at http://wiki2.issuecrawler.net/twiki/bin/view/Dmi/ClimateChangeSkeptics.

- Florian Cramer: Animals who belong to the emperor
Florian Cramer began his presentation by addressing Theseus, indeed a project launched by Germany after it had backed out of Quaero. See http://theseus-programm.de/.
Theseus (like Quaero, a multi-million Euro initiative) ‘ist ein vom Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie (BMWi) initiiertes Forschungsprogramm mit dem Ziel, eine neue internetbasierte Wissensinfrastruktur zu entwickeln, um das Wissen im Internet besser zu nutzen und zu verwerten.’ What Florian Cramer claimed during his presentation is that classification schemes on universal criteria are an impossibility, i.e. that they will always turn out to be representative of temporary states of affairs. Instead he proposed the folksonomy as a public typology that includes the uncertainty in the tagging process – it being a form of social classification and social indexing. Conveniently positioned in the user generated content paradigm, Florian Cramer’s talk constituted for me not only an answer to Google’s ‘Myth of Universal Knowledge’ but also to Jean-Noël Jeanneney’s ‘counter-hegemonic’ European digital library Europeana, sealed off from any user involvement and thus from folksonomies. See http://www.europeana.eu/
The Quaero – Google opposition was using relevance by the minute.

- Open Search: p2p search
Open Search, an Amsterdam-based initiative on the field of peer-to-peer search, was represented by Erik Borra. His companion, Koen Martens, could not come, but instead Borra had brought Joris van Hoboken who was ‘interested in’ Open Search.
The presentation of Open Search was very clear. Although Borra repeatedly (and also in his blog) stated that they actually lack the funding to continue their project with the desired speed – some people should get seriously worried now – the model of Open Search is that of a search engine operated by means of the connection between users rather than a central server or even a company who owns that. The Open Search model is not hampered by most of the problems that Michael Zimmer had been addressing earlier, simply because it doesn’t have central data. Erik Borra’s presentation can be found at http://www.open-search.net/Opensearch/QuaeroTalk.

- Joris van Hoboken
The following presentation, by Joris van Hoboken, a PhD student of http://www.ivir.nl/, the department of Information Law at Amsterdam University, articulated his concerns with the privacy-invasive dominant search engine models. Together with Bits of Freedom, http://www.bof.nl/, he organizes the ‘Big Brother Awards’ which are given each year to a privacy invader. Erik Borra wrote: “I invited Joris to do a presentation with me. Joris is a Phd student whose research concerns regulation problems in search engines. On the public Forum on Quaero he gave a short presentation on the implications for freedom of expression for search engine law and government involvement in particular. There are three actors on which you can focus regarding freedom of expression and search engines: the search engine, the information provider, and the user. From the user's perspective, ‘freedom of expression in the context of Internet search implies that a search engine has to make its index and ranking machinery openly available for its end users of various kinds to support free (not as in gratis) access to information. (user becomes the real search engine editor).’”
After Van Hoboken’s presentation I wondered what, for him, the role of political institutions (government) would be in creating better conditions – especially because he is not a search engine specialist but rather a legal scientist. One would expect that he would seek to reform government rather than search engines. Van Hoboken seemed to be rather pessimistic as to the possibilities to implement more progressive policies on privacy and digital citizenship into government politics, which made me think of Chantal Mouffe’s observation that we see a ‘negation of the current order’, including its democratic institutions, ‘with no guarantee that such a rejection is going to result in a democratic outcome’. Why not change the space of law as continously redefined by democratic politics? After all, we cannot democratically elect Google’s CEO, but we can elect a government? Van Hoboken seemed pessimistic (or cynical) about this.
As Chantal Mouffe stated during that 2002 Vienna talk (link above), she’d consider it wrong to say that ‘new media make possible the installment of a direct democracy, unmediated by representative institutions – allowing to bypass the traditional channels of politics like parties and trade unions.’ A p2p search engine, in this parallel, would be a form of ‘direct democracy’ – because unmediated by a traditional democratic institution.
I realize however, that the framework of politics as sketched by Chantal Mouffe may at times heavily rely on the institutions of the nation state (as in parties and trade unions), and that the current practices of web search are in part complicated because they bypass the territorial and thus call for new institutions on the basis of resistance. This may, in turn, justify Open Search & Van Hoboken’s move away from government regulation, although I believe that via democracy, we can claim a role in that, too.

- Discussion: Exodus
Florian Schneider hit off the closing discussion by proposing that the peer-to-peer search engine (as proposed by Open Search) seemed to have the best possibilities to enact an alternative to the centralized search engine. He then made the much needed distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. Politics is the set of practices, mediations and institutions that form and inform (public) policy, whereas the political is about the constitutive force of an antagonism, or a ‘we-them’ distinction.
Florian Schneider then called such an antagonism something of an ‘Exodus’, taken from Paolo Virno’s text ‘Virtuosity and Revolution’, to be found online at http://www.makeworlds.org/node/34 .
Quoting from the original text (thanks, Florian, for sending it):
“The key to political action (or rather the only possibility of extracting it from its present state of paralysis) consists in developing the publicness of Intellect outside of Work, and in opposition to it. The issue here has two distinct profiles, which are, however, strictly complementary. On the one hand, general intellect can only affirm itself as an autonomous public sphere, thus avoiding the ‘transfer’ of its own potential into the absolute power of Administration, if it cuts the linkage that binds it to the production of commodities and wage labor. On the other hand, the subversion of capitalist relations of production henceforth develops only with the institution of a non-State public sphere, a political community that has as its hinge general intellect. The salient characteristics of the post-Fordist experience (servile virtuosity, the valorization even of the faculty of language, the necessary relation with the ‘presence of others’, and so forth) postulate as a conflictual response nothing less than a radically new form of democracy.
I use the term Exodus here to define mass defection from the State, the alliance between general intellect and political Action, and a movement toward the public sphere of Intellect. The term is not at all conceived as some defensive existential strategy – it is neither exiting on tiptoe through the back door nor a search for sheltering hideaways. Quite the contrary: what I mean by Exodus is a full-fledged model of action, capable of confronting the challenges of modern politics – in short, capable of confronting the great themes articulated by Hobbes, Rousseau, Lenin, and Schmitt (I am thinking here of crucial couplings such as command/obedience, public/private, friend/enemy, consensus/violence, and so forth). Today, just as happened in the seventeenth century under the spur of the civil wars, a realm of common affairs has to be defined from scratch. Any such definition must draw out the opportunities for liberation that are to be found in taking command of this novel interweaving among Work, Action, and Intellect, which up until now we have only suffered. Exodus is the foundation of a Republic. The very idea of ‘republic’, however, requires a taking leave of State judicature: if Republic, then no longer State. The political action of the Exodus consists, therefore, in an engaged withdrawal. Only those who open a way of exit for themselves can do the founding; but, by the opposite token, only those who do the founding will succeed in finding the parting of the waters by which they will be able to leave Egypt. In the remainder of this essay, I shall attempt to circumstantiate the theme of Exodus – in other words, action as engaged withdrawal (or founding leave-taking) – through consideration of a series of key words: Disobedience, Intemperance, Multitude, Soviet, Example, Right of Resistance, and Miracle.”
‘Exodus’, then, would be the accurate name for a politization proper of a project like Open Search or p2p search in general, which for now (with all due respect) would still be grouped under ‘alternative search engines’. ‘Exodus’ has the same amount of characters as ‘Quaero’. It articulates a project that is, by its naming, conscious of the hegemonic nature of its adversary/opponent. The mythological claim of an ‘Exodus’ also puts a clear limit to the endless openness as suggested by many naming projects in the new media. Openness and transparency have been claimed already by the dominant discourse and thus are harmless – an Exodus implies a border, a closure set by the political.
Then, Florian Cramer intervened. A quote from Jodi Dean’s blog:
‘(he) gave a rousing speech that all agreed marked an appropriate end point for this phase of the conversation. So, he said that exodus is a metaphor, with limits, and that exodus can't mean here anything like a kind of neo-luddite movement/moment. And, he refused the demand for an image. More specifically, he said that the very question of 'what would a European search engine look like' should be eliminated (for good techie reasons involved API, available public interface). There isn't one answer, one image, one model.
This fits well with the theme of the imaginary that I took from the conference. It accepts neither the imaginary, nor calls for a symbolic (name, authority, law). It traverses these with a different kind of accountability (clearly not quite ready for release, but maybe soon in beta). Maybe this is something like an act in information politics.’
I could not agree more.
We will all continue on Exodus.

This has been in no ways a conclusive or objective report. It was hugely simplified, and many interventions were left out. Please add if there is (undoubtedly) something crucial forgotten.

Daniel van der Velden on behalf of Metahaven