Once Upon a Time, “About 1.170 Results”: Exploring the Narrative Power of Search Engines

Abstract Search engines play a pivotal role in online ecology and can have a significant impact on people, especially in the case of a name search. The pros and cons of removing search results have been at the heart of an ongoing debate revolving around “the right ro be forgotten” (art. 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation). This article proposes to contribute the discussion by philosophically reflecting on the transformative power of search engines in relation to original content. It shows that the implications of search engines run deeper than the mere display of faulty or outdated content. In order to reveal and conceptualise the impact that search engines have on the information they present, this article operationalises Ricoeur’s notion of ‘semantic autonomy’ in a digital context. This offers a framework that is used to analyse the transformative power of search engines across several dimensions: the relation to authors, audiences, the message and the semantic value of content. The article concludes that search engines have a transformative power that may bypass human intentions on multiple levels and, to a certain degree, allows them to ‘tell a story’ on their own.