Questions in the Dissertation
Questions extracted from Situating Web Searching in Data Engineering. These include my own questions, questions from interview participants, and questions from cited works.
Abstract(1)
When does web search work?
1. Introduction(14)
How are they able to search?
Does this work for them?
How does it work for them?
How do they learn to search the web as data engineers?
Do they really “just google it”?
Are their employers OK with this?
What can we learn from their success?
Why look at the use of general-purpose web search engines?
What does it mean to say search is extended?
I wondered, if they seem to so successfully incorporate general-purpose web search into their work maybe I might look closer?
Could I look at how these people in coding roles talked about and shared search to better understand what searching is and could be?
Do they “just google it”?
How does knowledge of the mechanisms of search inform their searching practices?
How is responsibility assigned?
2. Methods and Methodologies(8)
Where does one go to see web searching happen, to see web searching at work?
What does a system do?
How might we think about the fact that employees are going to a general pool of resources and bringing code and ideas back to the firm without that errand closely monitored or managed?
How are perceptions of affordance constructed?
Is the analysis believable/credible?
Anything feel off?
Or exciting?
Is the analysis useful or meaningful to you?
3. Admitting searching(11)
Sometimes I just wonder, like, who taught them how to search?
So how then do they learn to search at work?
Search talk?
Midway through the interview I asked Amar: “Are you talking with your team about the searches you’re doing?
For them, because they didn’t have a dedicated process—and it wasn’t me going out of the way, because I’d never prescribe that this is how you should do it—But they kind of were ‘Hey, every time I have a problem I have to like, like do a couple of Google searches and if I can’t find anything I have to come to you and then you, even if you don’t have an answer immediately you pretty much find it, find resources pretty quickly, how?
When you are googling things you can hit one web page and be like ‘oh, I don’t know what this means’ and then go to a second line and “oh I don’t know this is either!” and suddenly you’re learning about quantum physics, right?
I asked a follow-up: Can you recall any of those conversations or times when you politely suggested googling?
Like do you think I just memorize it?
Do you think that search is going to get the answer you want?
Sometimes I just wonder, like, who taught them how to search?
Conclusion: Condoning or celebrating searching?
4. Extending searching(24)
Are the search confessions and experience searching in school and everyday life enough for them to use search successfully as data engineers?
Does engaging in search confessions provide enoughparticipation to support the learning of these practices?
Or do they have theessential tools or acritical piece of information that helps them?
How is their technical knowledge and knowledge of their craft applied to make search work?
Where is that knowledge?
How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is?
How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all?
So what about the mechanisms of web search must be understood for ordinary successful use?
How do you learn to use an information infrastructure such as search engines?
It is very much a gradient descent type of problem. ‘Oh, this looks like the right solution.’ This also comes with experience too, right?
Sometimes you are stuck with small things that you need to understand… What’s going wrong?
Why is something not working?
Those are basically around: What are you doing on a day-to-day basis?
Can I get a more clearer solution from that?
I would try to see, OK, is this the problem I want?
My team kinda comes in to figure out: OK, how do we turn this model into an API that is ready for production?
How do we integrate that into the business based on the current engineering and product structures that we have setup for that feature?
How do we start to scale this and monitor this properly considering the fact that we have client facing traffic now?
And towards the other half of the quarter it is mostly about doing things, following best practices and trying to figure out, doing everything by the book, perfecting all aspects of running a production system, that includes: How do you easily deploy things?
How do you deploy changes?
How do you automate a lot of things?
How do you, I guess, plan for failures?
It’s mostly about, once you have an idea that this will work, how do you make sure this will work 99.9999% of the time?
Where and with whom is ‘just google it’ helpful or not?
5. Repairing searching(6)
What happens when web searches fail?
What do data engineers do when their searches fail?
I mean, your peers, they probably want to help themselves before they help you, right?
Q: Do you ever answer questions in these groups?
And that is largely due to my minority status in the tech industry and what people’s assumptions are about a women in the tech industry who is asking questions, right?
What is the stack trace?
6. Owning searching(11)
Why does search remain a private and solitary practice given the rich trace data generated by search, the rapacious appetite for data collection and analysis among the data engineering community and the companies in which they practice?
And what allows this community to avoid the scrutiny generally deemed essential to self-reflection, optimization, efficiency, and innovation?
While doing this research there was an ever-present question on my mind: are or might companies monitor and manage the web searching practices of their workers in order to improve performance?
Would data engineers turn their skill at data analysis upon their own workflows, to improve their own work and potentially competitive standing, or to collectively optimize data engineering work?
On the other end, might companies or collectives of professionals develop tools to share search learnings or regularize search strategies through more structured and automated means?
Would I find gap-bridging in the data engineer web search practices?
The question can also be formulated as: Where is the data gathering (or the surveillance and informating, the logic of accumulation and the data imperative) and the gap-bridging to improve the labor process in the work of data engineers?
Why do I seem to find so little technocratization of web search?
What is going on?
Why is search, so heavily used, so very much admitted into the work practices, still so solitary and secretive?
Why does it appear as though technocratization of search is absent?
7. Conclusion(34)
How are search confessions and search memes (“just google it”, “google is your friend”, “LMGTFY”, “google knows everything until you have an assignment”) enrolled in other settings?
Search directives?
Are there settings where web search has reached something closer to closure (Bijker et al., 1993) ?
What are the calls for memorization rather than reliance on web search?
Who is using their own search engine?
Does legitimation of web search reliance in schooling in some fields map onto the use of web search in the workplace?
How is the legitimation in these various settings taken up by or against different people within the setting?
Are there search practices that distribute more aspects of searching (than query formulation and results evaluation) to other systems and people?
How are seeds disseminated and found in other settings?
Are there other search settings where evaluation of results can be done so decoupled from the search and the performance effects?
What types of searches, in what settings provide the least space for evaluation and decoupling?
How are searches for the various “Your Money Your Life” topics—topics that have “a high risk of harm because content about these topics could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society” (Google, 2022) —extended in different settings?
How do different settings provide impetuses for search?
Can seeds be disseminated as an intervention?
How does this finding change if the non-work related searches of this group of people are also scrutinized?
Under what conditions does personal knowledge of the technical mechanisms matter significantly in other cases of web search, search, or the use of other information technologies?
How do we identify the boundary conditions?
What specific advantages might knowledge of the technical mechanisms of web search provide in different situations?
Do very high levels of domain or search mechanism expertise counteract search automation bias?
How does frequency, variety, or urgency of searching interact with these questions?
How is this used, not as a substitute or comparison, but to formulate or evaluate web searches?
How could we encourage more sharing of searches while retaining the value of intimacy for learning, retaining the safety to search within cultures that still penalize the learner?
Might we draw on contextual integrity (Nissenbaum, 2011a) ?
Can we find examples where such sharing is practiced and effective?
Is web search treated differently by practitioners who adopt lessons from human factors and safety science (blameless postmortems, no single cause of failure)?
How does the TIL (Today I Learned) movement treat responsibility in search?
How does the use of school or workplace “no stupid questions” channels treat responsibility in search?
Are there elements of open source coding movements, with the tension between generalized reciprocity and individualized responsibility, like those studied by Weber (2004) , Coleman (2012) , Dunbar-Hester (2020) that have varying treatments of responsibility for knowledge?
Koonin (2019) ’s “Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer” is widely shared, has her professional experience, and that of those who also publicly shared (or share) their searching, shifted?
How do teachers or livestreamers who code and search live discuss the “obligation to know” (Reagle, 2016) and the assignment of credit and blame for knowledge?
Tripodi (2022b) describes a “do-it-yourself” approach to search where propagandists appear to successfully convince people they need to think for themselves and that web searching fact-checking is the legitimate approach to that, all while feeding them search queries that constrain what they might find.117 Does the mantle for searching that these people have taken on still maintain a backstage for the actual searching activity, or is it proudly shared?
While it may be easy to identify examples of workers who do have their searching activity formally surveilled, restricted, or nudged by management, how do they resist or adopt these constraints/affordances?
How are people using large language models to influence different aspects of search activity?118 Search engine optimization experts use a variety of tools to better understand searching behavior of potential customers, do they adapt those tools to their own everyday or YMYL searching activity?
Who will make successful use of search?