Google, volume 2

Google Images is the largest image search engine on the Internet. According to its guiding principles, the search engine should display the most relevant images for searches. Ten years ago, Felix Heyes and Ben West put this principle to the test.

In their iconic book Google volume 1, they replaced the 21,110 words and their mean- ings in the English Pocket Dictionary with the first image that appeared when the word was searched for on Google Images. Some images are obvious, others are comical or downright shocking. This illustrated dictionary highlights the preju- dices and limitations of the search engine, and more generally the relative poverty of the supposedly most relevant results.

Like volume 1, Google volume 2 is a unique testimony to the visual culture of its time, our time. With the complicity of Douglas Coupland, introducing this 1.368-pag- es-full-of-25.000-images-book, we plunge into the chaotic world of the Internet with the question: will I see structures appear, will I find my way?