Prodexchange: Digital–industrial economization in Google Search supply chain

Using Google as a case study, this paper analyzes the online advertising sector's search industry. Arguing that search engines are not engines, it examines Google Search as a supply chain composed of five nodes: Crawler, Indexer, Ranker, Publisher, and Data Center. The final product of this chain is the search service presented to Google consumers, complete with ads and ancillary information. Empirically showing that production and exchange are one economic process in most of these supply chain nodes, we argue that treating them separately is neither accurate for description nor feasible for theory. In reality, Google Search produces and exchanges simultaneously. We observe that the social sciences lack an approach to analyze such unitary production/exchange relations in computational industries. Addressing this blind spot, the paper offers an alternative to describe how the search industry works by bridging supply chain literature in management and the economization approach in sociology. We introduce the digital–industrial economization approach to analyze Google Search's supply chain, in which a variety of nodes concurrently produce, exchange, barter, maintain, and/or store search products and their inputs. We present the term prodexchange to characterize these novel integrated production/exchange combinations.