My writer’s block has writer’s block. Still, I don’t want this place to be aban­doned com­pletely so I’m going to revisit an oldie but goodie: what do you see when you google barbie?

Yochai Ben­kler made a big deal of the Google search results for Bar­bie in his book The Wealth of Net­works (2006), where he claimed that, whereas other search engines gave you only sales-related Bar­bie sites in the top ten, Google’s “rad­i­cally decen­tral­ized” algo­rithm revealed an entirely dif­fer­ent pic­ture of Bar­bie. “The lit­tle girl who searches for Bar­bie on Google will encounter a cul­tur­ally con­tested fig­ure. The same girl, search­ing on Over­ture, will encounter a com­mod­ity toy”.

But that was in 2006. Since then things have changed in the google-sphere. I posted about this 18 months ago in Bar­bie slinks back to the con­fines of feminist-criticism sym­posia. Here were the Google first page results from 2006 as reported by Benkler:

barbie.com
Bar­bie Col­lecter
AdiosBarbie.com
Bar­bie Bazaar
If You Were a Bar­bie, Which Messed Up Ver­sion would you be?
Vis­i­ble Bar­bie project (macabre images…)
Bar­bie: The Image of us all (1995 under­grad­u­ate paper)
Andigraph.free.fre (Bar­bie and Ken sex ani­ma­tion)
Sui­cide bomber Bar­bie
Bar­bies (dressed and painted as coun­ter­cul­tural images)

and here were the results in Jan­u­ary 2008:

Barbie.com — Activ­i­ties and Games for Girls Online! (together with eight other links to My Scene, Ever­ty­thingg­girl, Polly Pocket, Kel­ly­club, and so on).
Barbie.co.uk — Activ­i­ties and Games for Girls Online!
Bar­bie — Wikipedia, the free ency­clo­pe­dia
Bar­bie Col­lec­tor -     (The offi­cial Mat­tel site for Bar­bie Col­lec­tor)
Bar­bie Girls
Mat­tel — Our Toys — Bar­bie
The Dis­torted Bar­bie
YouTube — bar­bie girl — aqua
Bar­bie — Bar­bie Dress up — Fash­ion for Bar­bie
Barbie.ca

and I con­cluded that “this search is basi­cally owned by Mat­tel. Click­ing the top link takes you to a pink page with “Think Pink” writ­ten in the mid­dle of it, and the major­ity of the sites fea­ture pink promi­nently. No more defin­ing the cul­tural sym­bols of our day for you, nine-year-old girl! Quit the self-aware polit­i­cal dis­course and get back to dress­ing that doll in gender-appropriate colours (as selected for you by Mattel).”

Every now and again I google bar­bie and see what’s changed as the Google search engine becomes more elab­o­rate. So here are today’s results (from south­ern Ontario).

Barbie.com — Activ­i­ties and Games for Girls Online! (together with eight other links to My Scene, Ever­ty­thingg­girl, Polly Pocket, Kel­ly­club, and so on).
Barbie.com — Fun and Games
Bar­bie — Wikipedia, the free ency­clo­pe­dia
News results for bar­bie (with sev­eral other links)
Bar­bie Col­lec­tor -     (The offi­cial Mat­tel site for Bar­bie Col­lec­tor)
Barbie.co.uk — Activ­i­ties and Games for Girls Online!
Barbie.ca
Bar­bie Girls — and a sub­link
Cel­e­brate 50 Years of Bar­bie
Video results for bar­bie — with two links to Aqua’s Bar­bie Girl video
Searches related to bar­bie — all strictly ortho­dox except for one about Tai­wanese actress and singer Bar­bie Xu.

Yes, the lit­tle girl who searches for Bar­bie on Google will now encounter a com­mod­ity toy.

The one big change in the last 18 months is that the remain­ing coun­ter­cul­tural site from 2008 has now been pushed over the edge to page 2 of the search results, dis­placed by two Google-owned col­lec­tions of links (News and Videos). I’m sure you’ve seen this in your own searches. Google presents more links on and around the “top ten” results, in “related searches”, and in col­lec­tions of video, news, and image links. One effect of this change is that Google now often gets one more click from you before you leave their domain. Google is extend­ing its role from point­ing you vaguely towards your des­ti­na­tion to guid­ing you more pre­cisely, and more prof­itably, all the way along the path.

Of the other top-level links, seven are owned by Mat­tel (Two to barbie.com, Bar­bie col­lec­tor, Bar­bie Girls, barbie.co.uk, barbie.ca, Cel­e­brate 50 years of Bar­bie) and the remain­ing link is to Wikipedia, now the only non-commercial site on the front page. Fol­low­ing Nick Carr’s infor­mal exper­i­ment we may have expected Wikipedia to move even higher in the results, but it has just held its place.

Inde­pen­dent sites are out there in their mil­lions of course, but they are unfor­tu­nately being pushed to the periph­ery of our field of vision by com­mer­cial efforts — of Mat­tel in this case. It should be no sur­prise that as the web has become main­stream, and as cor­po­ra­tions realise the neces­sity of invest­ing in their web pres­ence, the web begins to look more like other main­stream media. Per­haps more evi­dence that the Web’s counter-cultural moment is over.