I'll Google It!: How Collective Wisdom is Changing Search Ideology and the Canons of Rhetoric

Abstract:   “I'll Google It!: How Collective Wisdom is Changing Search Ideology and the Canons of Rhetoric” explorethe transition between search result infrastructure organized by algorithm and by collective wisdom; composition theorists must recognize this transition as a rhetorical act in order to react theoretically and pedagogically.  Internet search engines such as Google help users find websites with information related to search terms.  When seeking information for the development of informed argument, often the first action we take is to “google it.”  Yet, because of the infrastructure that Google and others employ to decide the arrangement of search results, internet users do more than “use” search engines:  they create them.  By first exploring the implications of all five rhetorical canons in the search engine and its infrastructure, I will argue that searching for information via search engine is a unique rhetorical act.  I will then provide examples of ways internet users have forced recognition of collective activity and explain the collective wisdom movement's effects on information exchange on the internet.  I argue that this movement toward collectivity will play an even greater part in search activity as collective intelligence becomes a more prominent means of knowledge development.  

Key Terms:  
Google
search engine
collective wisdom
collective intelligence
rhetorical canon

	Internet search engines such as Google, Ask, and Bing help users find websites with information related to search terms.  When seeking information for the development of informed argument, often the first action we take is to “google it.”  Yet, because of the infrastructure that Google and others employ to decide the arrangement of search results, internet users do more than “use” search engines:  in essence, they create them. Searching is not merely a receptive act, but a creative one as well. Search engines manifest themselves as a tool, as a product, and as an action.  Each of these manifestations represents a different kind of rhetorical act.  By first exploring the implications of all five elements of the rhetorical canon—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—in the search engine and its infrastructure, I will argue that searching for information via a search engine is a unique rhetorical act.  I will then provide examples of ways internet users have forced recognition of collective activity and explain the collective wisdom movement's effects on information exchange on the internet.  Newer versions of search engines are providing even more collective options for users, and I argue that this movement toward collectivity will play an even greater part in search activity as collective intelligence becomes a more prominent means of knowledge development (knowledge being understood as a historically bound social development rather than something perfectable or permanent).  Therefore, I will argue that we are living in a time of ideological transition between when search engine results are arranged mostly by mathematical algorithms and a time when they are decided more prominently by the collective wisdom of their users. We must recognize this ideological transition into “collective capability” as a rhetorical act because our understanding of textual production is necessarily changed by these evolutions (Tapscott & Williams, 2006, p. 3).  Moreover, our pedagogical and theoretical paradigms are naturally affected by such changes in knowledge-making.  
Searching as Rhetorical Product, Act, and Tool 
	Johndan Johnson-Eilola (2004) has adeptly argued that search engine results can and should be viewed as documents in his essay “The Database and the Essay:  Understanding Composition as Articulation” included in the collection Writing New Media.  He says, “the space of a search engine screen has itself been painstakingly designed, with various sections written to satisfy an extremely large number of audiences” (p. 218).  The rhetorical decisions made by the web site's designers as well as the results calculated by the company's algorithm clearly reflects the style and delivery aspects of the rhetorical canon, but further  “if we value this as a form of writing, then we can begin to argue that the sorts of choices one makes in writing the database—for example, what categories to include, what to exclude; which category to put first, etc.—we can start to argue that these choices involve responsibilities to the reader and to society, just as we now do in other, more traditional forms of writing” (Johnson-Eilola, 2004, p. 220).  Viewing the search engine results page as a delivered product is probably not much of an intellectual stretch for many readers; it's an assumption that many of us who deal with the composition and analysis of texts would take for granted.  We should also, as Johnson-Eilola suggests, consider how the search engine represents other aspects of rhetorical work beyond status as a document in order to be cognizant of its multifaceted capacity to teach us about rhetoric in a collective age.  
	I find it useful to use the traditional rhetorical canons as an outline for exploring the rhetorical aspects of search engines for, in many ways, the search engine provides a complicated example of rhetoric as consumption, composition, and representation simultaneously.  While any act of searching for information can be seen as a type of invention as it represents the act of consuming information to be used in the development of an argument, traditional searching methods such as analog library research do not also compose new texts during the act of searching.  Certainly, a rhetorical act took place when an author or editor composed, for example, a traditional encyclopedia entry, but that text was not composed as a direct and immediate response to the search query.  In other words, encyclopedia indeces are static while the search engine is dynamic and symbiotic.  Therefore, we must understand that while all types of research are in some way rhetorical acts, the internet search engine provides a unique opportunity for analysis in its relationship with searchers as a tool for invention as well as a product of invention. 
	The results shown in a search engine results page allow users to browse web documents with potentially relevant information, advancing the invention of outside documents and arguments, but the searcher must invent the search in order to begin the results process.  The search engine does not invent for the searcher; in this way alone is it passive or receptive.  In all other reflections of the rhetorical canons, Google is active.  Although Google does provide invention suggestions for its users in the form of a drop down box listing those searches a person might be interested in based on the letters already entered, the searcher must still start the process by typing in that first letter.  Almost immediately after that invented search query is entered into the query box, the search engine provides the requested search results in a results page.  (See Figure 1)  The arrangement of that results page document is decided by PageRank™ for Google (by other algorithmical systems for other search engines) and shows results through a system of chronology (which link was most recently created or viewed), relevancy (how many times the search phrase is used in a single page or how many times other internet sources reference that link), or clustering (where similar types of results are arranged together). The original internet search engines presented the results in reverse chronological order, the most recently created or updated pages coming first.  Chronology was then replaced by relevance ranking, which is the system used by Google:  
		The software behind Google's search technology conducts a series of simultaneous 			calculations requiring only a fraction of a second.  Traditional search engines rely 			heavily on how often a word appears on a web page.  Google uses numerous factors 			including its patented PageRank™ algorithm to examine the entire link structure of the 			web and determine which pages are most important. It then conducts hypertext matching 		analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. 			By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the 		most relevant and reliable results first.  (Google, 2007b)
We can see that Google's PageRank™ system does not only calculate how many times websites link to other websites or use a particular word; every website is qualified as more or less relevant and reliable than others.  The most reliable websites are given a higher page rank and have greater sway in which sites come up first on the search results document.  Clusty.com, as the name suggests, uses a clustering system; so do smaller sites such as WiseNut, Gigablast, and Exalead.  Clustering results work as you might imagine them to:  results are organized in groups—or clusters—that are closely related.  The searcher, then, is able to pick out which groups are most relevant to the search and save themselves the time of “scrolling down the list and picking the pertinent items one-by-one” (Jacsco, 2007, p. 86).  Using a clustering arrangement rather than a chronological or relevancy ranking may save time and energy for the searcher, but they have not been as popular with users. Yet, Google's mode of arrangement still reigns—for now.    
	Style is an overarching element of the search engine that occurs without the user's volition or control.  The search engine's style has been decided, designed, and coded by the company itself.  (Notice in Figure 1 that style comes before invention, arrangement and delivery because it is predetermined before the search act).  Google's style, in particular, has become part of its appeal and recognizability.  The simple white space with a colorful, block lettered “Google” in the middle of the screen above a simple search box are recognizable to millions of internet users. Many users are also amused by the seasonal and holiday stylistic variations applied to the Google logo.  After the search is initiated, the searcher is taken to the search results page, which has also been pre-stylized by the designers.  Search results are listed on the left with links to the appropriate pages highlighted in blue.  On the right, the searcher can find sponsored links from advertisers trying to sell their wares (this is how Google makes a profit).  The style is deceptively simple, focusing on primary colors on a white background, which creates a situation for the searcher to focus on the arranged, delivered information.  
	While the predetermined style is the simplest of the canons in the search engine, memory is one of the most complicated.  The search engine has a collective memory developed by scouring the internet for links to websites; it remembers which links are most relevant, which Google defines as those sites to which other internet sites have linked and calls on that memory when a specific search requires.  Other search engines rely on their own extensive memory systems.  These systems exemplify the symbiotic relationship between the engine and user:  in the rhetorical act of searching, Google cannot work without the users' invention, but the user does not have the mental capacity to remember information to the extent the memory systems do.  The Google searcher relies on Google's memory and seeks Google out because of it.  The scope of the search engine's memory and its ability to access that entire scope at lightning fast speeds is, in fact, the very appeal of the internet search engine for many.  Further, as the search engine's memory relies heavily on the linkage of website creators and bloggers the memory system is at the will of internet users-at-large.  
	In the internet search engine, arrangement, memory,  and delivery are somewhat conflated; the search engine consults its vast memory, decides on the appropriate arrangement, and delivers the results page almost simultaneously. When someone enters a search query, “In that 0.12 seconds, what Google is doing is asking the entire Web to decide which page contains the most useful information, and the page that gets the most votes goes first on the list” (Surowiecki, 2004, p. 16).  Further, as a company, Google has found ways to make the delivery of its search results as efficient as possible for its users.  If using the web browser Mozilla Firefox, for example, a Google search bar rests in the upper right hand corner of rhw browser screen.  In this way, if an individual is checking e-mail and wants to search on Google, the searcher need not leave e-mail, open a new browser window or tab, and go to the Google homepage to do the search.  Many larger websites also include a Google bar on their pages for convenience and offer the option of searching on the World Wide Web for answers or within the confines of that page or system of pages.  
 	Through these tactics of delivery, Google has made search results almost ubiquitously available on the web (the only way to use it considering that these searches are not available in a print format and that their complicated nature could never be adequately represented in print) and now—with innovations in technology—on  so-called “smart” phones such as the iPhone or Blackberry.  Because of the overwhelming availability of search engines, these different aspects of the rhetorical act of searching happen so often and so quickly that many users would probably find them indistinguishable. The rhetorical canons, though, do illuminate different aspects of the same act.  The user invents the search, the engine searches its memory, the engine arranges the results, and then it delivers the results to the searcher, but we often take the intricacies for granted.  
	A particularly unique aspect of the search engine's relationship with the rhetorical canons is the fact that the search-act is different every time and at any one time hundreds of thousands to millions of users have their own individual rhetorical experiences with search engines.  Figure 1 shows the aspects of the canons used in a single, traditional search act, and all five canons are enacted in a matter of seconds for each new search.  Every new search has a new invention, arrangement, memory, and delivery (style alone would be consistent for each search engine).  Yet, these individual acts work together when taken by the search engine infrastructure to make collective knowledge and take collective actions.  
Google Bombs as Aggressive, Collective Rhetorical Behavior
	One way to understand the massive effect of collectivity on the search engine is to deeply analyze one aspect of the search engine.  So-called “Google bombs” are an example of aggressive, collective rhetorical activity that uses the search engine as a tool (some might even argue, a weapon).  n The manipulation of Google's “I'm Feeling Lucky” function in a Google bomb is an example of users' desire for volition and collective knowledge building on the internet as they conspire to change the “I'm Feeling Lucky” response.  
 	Google attempts to make result delivery efficient for the user with the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on Google's main search page.  "I'm Feeling Lucky" works by sending the searcher straight to the most relevant page of the results; the searcher completely by-passes the results page document (arrangement) and goes straight to the delivery of the most relevant website.  As Google explains this service:  “An 'I'm Feeling Lucky' search means you spend less time searching for web pages and more time looking at them” (Google, 2007c, para. 1).   If the searcher is using Google to help in the invention process, the information received on an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search will have already been filtered and, therefore, reflect the mechanizations of the Google selection process.  In some cases, what Google considers most relevant may not be what the searcher considers most relevant.  Therefore, the searcher might be required to adjust the search query invention to a more appropriate or more specific phrase.  (In Figure 1, this re-invention is represented by the arrow on the far right and middle indicating a relationship between “search query INVENTION (from user)” and “Search results document”).  
Because the manner in which links are ordered—and therefore which one pops up during an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search—is determined by how many other sites link to a site, “Google bombs” can occur.  A “Google bomb” is dropped when bloggers and other web site creators conspire to change what is most relevant on Google's search results documents by extraneously linking certain phrases to particular sites.  One of the most famous Google bombs is the phrase “miserable failure,”which for a period of time would lead searchers to an official White House site representing George W. Bush's administration,   http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/ (The White House, 2007).  As Sara Kehaulani (2007) explains in her Washington Post article “Google Moves to Disarm Search 'Bombs',” “George Johnston, a Bellevue, Wash. man who claims to be the architect of the 'miserable failure' Google bomb, said he started his campaign in 2003 because it would be 'fun' and 'easy.'  He e-mailed a number of popular bloggers and asked them to use the phrase and create a link to the White House Web site.  It quickly took off”  (para. 8).  In this way, individuals—even if they do not use the Google search engine themselves—take direct control over the arrangement of the Google results pages.  “Google bombs” are evidence that people like to have control over what they are told is most relevant to their interests; they also provide evidence of one way internet users have conspired to exert collective power over internet interactions.  A single blogger or user cannot engage a “Google bomb” on her own; it requires many individual acts exerting authority in their collective power.  
Understanding this desire, Google had been reluctant to change its results postings because they have not wanted to interfere with what its users see fit to manipulate (even if it may seem like an abuse), but  in 2007 they changed their position.  Fearful that users would confuse these Google bombs with the political ideologies of the company itself, they adjusted the algorithms that control their results pages to avoid bombs (Kehaulani, 2007, para. 2).  Yet, some of these bombs are still up and working.  For example, typing in “French military victories” “still produces an “I'm Feeing Lucky” result that says, 'Your search—French military victories—did not match any documents.'  Click there and you find a mockup of a Google search page asking the question 'Did you mean:  French military defeats'” (Cohen, 2007, para. 8).  These examples are amusing, but they have potentially serious implications: “Bloggers get authority from the citation others give them; that authority attracts attention” (Lessig, 2006, p. 243).  Bloggers, who by the mere inclusion in that category reflect rhetorical activity on the web, exert ambition in inventing new web documents and interfering with search page documents.  
In an article for The Sacramento Bee, Erika Chavez (2005) argues these Google bombs can serve as political subversion.  She says, “Some liken Google bombs to political activism, while others see it as harmless (and funny) cybergraffiti” (para. 16).  Her article mentions several political bloggers from both sides of the fence, none of whom take Google bombing too seriously.  One even parallels it to throwing spitballs from the back of the room.  Yet, while these bloggers and journalists may not see Google bombing as serious political activity, it is serious rhetorical activity.  For a techné powered mainly by the choices of internet users, Google gives agency to its own searchers as well as any user of the internet at large.  Yes, Google as a company controls the colors, fonts and layout of the results page—its style—but internet users are deciding which pages are most interesting, which information is most important, and which sites are most user-friendly and tacitly rewarding them by giving them preference in Google arrangement and delivery through links.    And when they decide the most relevant link is inadequate or doesn't meet some greater rhetorical desire, they change it.  
	Other web documents, like the popular Wikipedia encyclopedia, reflect a similar desire for consumer input in the wisdom of the web.  In his 1989 book Writing Space, Jay David Bolter said, “although readers can search for topics in a number of ways, they cannot intervene in the structure of encyclopedia or build new structures” (p. 95).  When that book was published that may have been true, but we are certainly in a time now when search engines and electronic encyclopedias are giving more and more power to their users.  Further, “in the last decade there has been a stampede toward open standards, in part because customers are demanding them” (Tapscott & Williams, 2006, p. 21).  This demand is a result of an ideological change in which readers, web users, recognize documents created by collaboration through collective wisdom as superior and more desirable both as consumers and participators because of the intrinsic transfer and creation of knowledge in the interaction.  
We Make Knowledge When We Search Together
	Collective intelligence has become a catch phrase used to describe the ways that the internet is  shaped by the actions and interactions of its users.  Author and renowned expert on collective intelligence Pierre Lévy (1999) defines collective intelligence as “a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills” (p. 13).   In simpler terms, James Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds “argues that your average bunch of people can guess the weight of a cow or predict an Oscar winner better than an expert can” (Levy & Stone, 2006, para. 7).  To understand collective intelligence on the web, one must understand the huge way that our view and use of the internet has changed since its inception.  We are now using the “living web;” instead of traveling to some far off place called cyberspace, as was once described, we are the information on the web.  It is not a place to go, but “things to do, ways to express yourself, means to connect with others and extend your own horizons.  Cyberspace was somewhere else.  The Web is where we live” (Levy & Stone, 2006, para. 24).  In the article “The New Wisdom of the Web,” Steven Levy and Brad Stone (2006) say, “What makes the Web alive is, quite simply, us.  Our presence, most often conducted at the speed of broadband, is constant and mandatory” (para. 5).  Indeed, in the last few years, interactive web communities such as Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and others have flourished at astronomical rates.  Professional, educational, platonic, and romantic relationships are begun, enhanced, supplemented, and ended on the internet.  
In Wikinomics, Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams (2006) explain how the idea of collectivity seeps into how we view and use capitalism effectively in our society.  They call this collaborative economic theory “wikinomics.  This is more than open source, social networking, so-called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject.  Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally” (p. 3). They emphasize that this new collaboration ideology is a natural progression in economics because many people who held little economic sway also held little political sway, were even politically and economically ignored.  A frustration as a result of this disconnection between power and knowledge led people to desire, seek out, and create ways to give themselves more agency in the invention and delivery of knowledge and goods.  Now, “billions of connected individuals can . . . participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development in ways we once only dreamed of” (p. 3).  The public now has the power to create together something potentially better than the previously named experts could create on their own using “weapons of mass collaboration” (p. 11).  Pierre Lévy tells us “power is now conferred through the optimal management of knowledge,” and people do not want to forfeit their ability to participate in the exchange of power and knowledge (p. 1).  
A main tenet that upholds collective intelligence is that the collaborators for a document are not only relaying ideas to one another, but actually creating knowledge in the interaction. As Pierre Lévy humorously points out:  “No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity.  There is no store of knowledge and knowledge is simply what we know” (pp. 13-14).  The type of knowledge-making interaction that internet collective wisdom embodies is expedited with web documents because of the speed with which information can be exchanged and the collaborative environment it allows.  As Bolter (1989) explains, “The physical book has fostered the idea that writing can and should be rounded into finite units of expression:  that a writer or reader can close his or her text off from all others” (p. 85).  Web documents, however, are not closed off from others; sources can be viewed, used, and changed with ease and speed.  Bolter (1989) explains:  
The computer in turn changes the technology of writing by adding new flexibility to the rapidity and efficiency of printing:  the computer allows a writer or reader to change a text as easily as he or she can duplicate it.  The capacity to adjust the text to each user's needs is unmechanical, uncharacteristic of the classic industrial machine, and this capacity derives from the unmechanical materials of electronic technology. . . The digital computer has helped to give us a new definition of the machine, as a complex interrelation of logical parts—an abstraction that unlike the steam engine and the dynamo, produces information rather than power.  If the printing press is the classic writing machine, the computer provides us with a technology of writing beyond mechanization.  (p. 34)  
The malleability of internet documents speeds up the exchange and creation of knowledge, instigating an unmatched urgency for interaction.  Participators are more rapidly than ever given the opportunity to create, give feedback, edit, and revise when necessary.  
	In this way, collaboration allows for its audience-creators to check the fidelity of document information efficiently.  Wikipedia is a document (not a traditional search engine, but similarly based on the search of its database) that relies on millions of users to be fact-checkers, proofreaders, and editors.  Wikipedia as a company has only a handful of employees, yet “The aim of Wikipedia is neutrality.  The contributors edit, and reedit, to frame a piece neutrally. . . . With nothing more than the effort of volunteers, the most used, and perhaps the most useful encyclopedia ever written has been created through millions of uncoordinated instances of collaboration” (Lessig,  2006, p. 243).  Even though this collaboration is “uncoordinated,” it has been proven to be as accurate as the old, more traditional printed encyclopedias.  Critics often charge Wikipedia with being inaccurate, but Wikipedia does not promise that its database has omnipotent knowledge on every subject.  Similarly, Google cannot guarantee that when I type in a search query that the very first result in the document will be the result that is best for me; it hopes on the probability that one of the first few results will be helpful to me because it relies on the intelligence of millions of internet users for that information. For the most part, these documents exhibit an amazing amount of reliability:  “Indeed, in one study that randomly collected entries from Wikipedia and from Encyclopedia Britannica, there were just as many errors in Britannica as in Wikipedia” (Lessig, 2006, p. 243).  Web documents inevitably balance when collective users can openly collaborate.  As Lawrence Lessig aptly points out, however, “Wikipedia is open to a certain kind of risk that Britannica is not—maliciousness” (Lessig, 2006, p. 243).  Similarly, search engines are open to maliciousness—Google bombs could do as much damage to the reliability of the search engine and the relevance of its search results as a computer virus could do to a person's hard drive.  What holds such misconduct at bay, however, is the checks and balance system that collective intelligence inherently exhibits; for every user that would want to do harm to the search results document, there are hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, more who would insist on the integrity of the document, of the search engine, and remedy any problems.   
	Intimidated by the possibility of manipulation, Google paradoxically uses collective intelligence as the memory for its PageRank™ system but also claims exemption from human intervention: “Google's technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement” (Google, 2007b, para. 5).  The very thing Google claims not to have—human involvement—is exactly what provides the intellectual power behind its infrastructure. As Surowiecki explains, “In the end, the crowd still rules.  To be smart at the top, the system has to be smart all the way through” (Surowiecki, 2004, p. 17).  Although Google has tried to deny the power of collective wisdom to manipulate the invention, arrangement, memory, and delivery of its results, other forward thinkers have embraced the ways collective wisdom can enact positive change in the search engine.  
As a reaction to customer feedback and participation, in 2008 acreator of Wikipedia launched a search engine based more on the collective intelligence of its users than Google.  The search engine would rely on volunteers providing feedback on search results, fine-tuning the search engine's memory with every individual search with a collective total effect.  While Google prides itself on its hands-off approach—the mathematical algorithms supposedly making it less susceptible to human fallibility—the new open source search engine (called Wikiasari in its planning phase and called Wikia Search when launched) would relish the user's ability to exert some volition over the search query.  This new search engine purposed for its users to have even more control over the results they received by employing an edit function where users could reorder the search results page to emphasize those links they found most useful in their search.  The search engine would memorize that rearrangement and take it into consideration the next time a searcher made the same search.  Other search engines have tried to incorporate more user interpretation and input into their results.  StumbleUpon shows its users the most relevant results from other search engines along with its own.  Across the internet, small, start-up search engines have heeded users' desire for collectivity and have attempted to foster it and capitalize from it.  
Unfortunately, Wikia Search was recently shut down because it could not gain enough popularity to remain active.  In fact, upon its alpha release, “Critics Wallop[ed] Wikia,” to quote the Business Week article covering the January 2008 opening (Burnsed).  Most critics found the results to be not unreliable but unrelevant to their search.  Founder Jimmy Wales asked for patience for the public as the experiment got underway, but patience is something many internet users may lack.  In a cyber-world where we want information and we want it now because we are accustomed to immediacy, patience is a most valued commodity.  And, the one thing required for collective interactions to occur is people.  
Google's massive popularity makes it difficult for much smaller search engines, like Wikia or StumbleUpon, to get a foothold in the market.  More importantly, however, in a keen business move, Google implemented some of the same collective tactics implemented by Wikia Search and integrated them into Google's infrastructure, making Wikia Search quickly obsolete.  If search engine users can have the comfort and familiarity of Google along with the ability to exercise some personal volition and collective intelligence, the choice is probably simple for many.  Tech writer Erick Schonfeld (2009) says, “Wikia Search got Googled when the search juggernaut launched its own Search Wiki feature, which lets you do pretty much the same thing on Google itself—move results up the page, block results, add comments—except it only affects your search results, not everyone’s” (para. 3).  This last phrase is particularly enlightening because it shows that, as discussed before, Google stops short of complete collectivity.  Users are given the illusion of control by being able to manipulate results, but the  manipulation is not registered into PageRank™'s memory.  But, as Schonfeld aptly points out, “if Wikia Search had never existed, Google might never have felt pressure to add wiki features to its interface. In that regard, Wikia Search did have an impact beyond its own site” (para. 3).  Slowly, search engine users are coming to expect that they will have some say in which results are given preference, and that indeterminably effects the presentation of the rhetorical canons on the search engine.  
We can see in the examples of “Google bombs” and the slow movement toward more overt collective input in major search engines such as Google that collective knowledge-making has become a major power broker in the search engine business.  Simultaneously, the ways the rhetorical canons are demonstrated in search engines is adjusting, affecting all manner of rhetorical composition related to it.  Figure 2 indicates how those changes might work.  Notice in particular the more important role the search plays in arrangement compared to Figure 1.  We can see these revision strategies in “Google bombs” and in the new edit function Google has implemented, which is heavily influenced by the now defunct Wikia Search.  As the creators of Wikia Search say, “Today, search undervalues the human touch.  Tomorrow, we will wonder how we ever did without it” (Wikia Search, 2008, para. 11).  
Disciplinary Action   
As the way we compose changes, so will our thinking processes, for “Writing is a technology for collective memory, for preserving and passing on human experience” (Bolter, 1989, p. 33).  Yet, we are in a time when human experience changes; therefore, we will see “economics of writing—materials, techniques, and uses—evolve and expand and sometimes deteriorate and collapse” (p. 37).  The importance of the different canons of rhetoric has shifted over time.  As Kathleen Welch (1999) explains in Electric Rhetoric, “Memory, of course, has been the fourth canon or function of rhetoric for 2,400 years, undulating, being rearranged in importance, and being reorganized according to various ideological constraints” (p. 107).  At this point, we rely on the mechanical memory of the computer to collect our collaborations and channel the revisions and additions we make as we go.  As composition theorists have been suggesting in peer review and group work strategies for decades, a collective process may be the necessary foundation for quality web document creation and the ideological transition of the way we process information:  Pierre Lévy “argues that we are passing from a Cartesian model of thought based upon the singular idea of cogito (I think) to a collective or plural cogitamus (we think)” (Provenzo, 1997, p. xi).  Because of economic shifts and technological innovations, “we” and “our” is becoming as useful and powerful as “I” and “mine.”  
This ideological shift is about more than process and ownership, though.  It represents a marked change in the way we create knowledge.  Tapscott and Williams (2006) say:  
we're talking about something dramatically different.  The new promise of collaboration is that with peer production we will harness human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence more efficiently and effectively than anything we have witnessed previously. . . .  Twenty years from now we will look back at this period of the early twenty-first century as a critical turning point in economic and social history. We will understand that we entered a new age, one based on new principles, worldviews, and business models where the nature of the game was changed.  (pp. 18-19)
Therefore, scholars of rhetoric must acknowledge that the ways we have previously envisioned the rhetorical canons are shifting and changing.  As people exert their agency by using these “weapons of mass collaboration,” the way we process information is changing (Tapscott & Williams, 2006, p. 11).  As the way we understand changes, our communication will also change, and this transition will be reflected in the canons of rhetoric.  Invention will be seen as something that is improved with peer acknowledgment; the burden of arrangement will lie with the masses, not a lone individual or mathematical computation; and, the collective memory of the many will hold more power than the few.  Search engines reflect the demand of the creator-consumers of its technology for collectivity.  In this new dynamic, there is no one creator of invention or possessor of memory.  Invention, arrangement, memory, and delivery are different with every individual search-act and simultaneously bears change on the next search act.  The public has shown that it desires to collaborate of its own free will.  The rhetorical canons will adjust to accommodate this desire, and as scholars of rhetoric we must take note of the way those changes occur in order to react theoretically and pedagogically.  
	At the very least, implications exist for feminist theory, collaborative pedagogy, and social-cognitive theory and are open for further exploration as the relationship between rhetoric and collective wisdom develops.  For feminist theorists, internet collaboration provides a de-gendered atmosphere in which to participate.  For any open wiki community or search engine algorithm, the gender of the users matters less than their participation in the act of knowledge transfer and creation through the collaborative process.  Women, men, transgender individuals, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are all welcome to participate in the process without even an acknowledgement of what categories they do or do not wish to be placed in or even that such categories exist; collaboration “[pushes] for notions and accounts of agency that exceed limited ideas of the determined subject” (Ritchie & Boardman, 1999, p. 606).  Participation in collective search results creation requires only the individual participators' negotiation with the whole, and those individuals may find comfort in their role as collective subject.  Bloggers are also free to use their blogs as tools to positively influence search engine results by linking to sites that uphold feminist values.  In this way, the feminist blogger's delivery of information directly influences someone else's invention through the search engine results.  The communal, non-individualistic nature of collectivity on the web may also be embraced by feminist theorists for its departure from strongly implemented, mathematically “correct,” but often lifeless responses found prior to the implementation of human intervention.  This decentering of authority and removal of the social processes of gendering in the activity of searching is a welcome ideological change for many.  
	Social-epistemic theorists should also find the process of creating knowledge through the search engine process a welcome activity for its ability to provide an example of knowledge that results from social interaction.  In the classroom, this new turn toward collectivity as represented in the search engine can be implemented through collaborative activities.  Once focused on the “dreaded” group project, collective projects via internet software have tremendous promise in providing a space for students to understand the way knowledge can be developed socially outside the structured walls of the classroom.  Students may even become more willing to contribute to documents in a collaborative environment because it lacks the immensely personal—often lonely—task of creating a document alone.  Collaboration requires less investment; the individual can decide for him or herself how much or how little energy to expend on a project.  In fact, “people can contribute to the 'digital commons' at very little cost to themselves, which makes collective action much more attractive.  Indeed, peer production is a very social activity.  All one needs is a computer, a network connection, and a bright spark of initiative and creativity to join in the economy” (Tapscott 12).  More often than not, students will be familiar enough with the ways internet collaboration works that an exercise in collectivity may even seem elementary to them.  
	Therefore, instead of “teaching” collectivity, complicating collectivity through activities that require analysis of the project, the information source, and the collective group would be fruitful.  Providing search engines as an example might, indeed, challenge students to think about where and how they get their information and, more importantly, what role they might play in creating knowledge by participating in the process.  A problematization of the search act would potentially require students to adjust their own search practices and contemplate the ways their searches add to collective knowledge making.  “Googling” as a part of the invention process comes easily; many of us do it every day without reflecting on its mechanizations.  Breaking the search engine into its different parts would require students to see Google as a tool—yes--but also a product of rhetorical practices inherent in the search acts of many.  

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