Google volume 2
by Felix Heyes & Ben West
Introduction by Douglas Coupland
22 416 pictures
1 328 pages
21 x 30,2 cm
ISBN: 978-2-36568-089-9
“As a computational photography of the entire Internet, Google, volume 2 captures the vast scale of the odd and beautiful landscape of information we all share. And by doing so in the unusually dissonant format of a gargantuan printed book, it shows that our world can feel more united when we *see* instead of just search.”
– John Maeda
“It’s time to do Google, volume 2. Oh! I’m REALLY curious to see what Vol.2 looks like inside… The Internet has no designer. It’s chaos, but I wonder if we’ll see ‘rules’ emerging.”
– Douglas Coupland
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 to the test.
In their book Google volume 1 (2013), they replaced the 21,110 words and their meanings in the English Pocket Dictionary with the first image that appeared when the word was searched for on Google Images. Some images were obvious, others were comical or downright shocking. The illustrated dictionary highlighted the prejudices and limitations of the search engine, and the relative poverty of the supposedly most relevant results.
Google volume 1 was a testament to the visual culture of its time. However, the internet is constantly changing. Ten years later, the same 21,110 words have once again been run through the search engine. Canadian novelist, visual artist and observer of modern-day culture Douglas Coupland wrote the introduction to Google volume 2 (published in November 2024), which comprises some 25.000 images on 1.368 pages to offer a fresh plunge into the chaotic world of today’s Internet.
