This article investigates how developers of alternative search engines challenge increasingly corporate imaginaries of digital futures by building out counter-imaginaries of search engines devoted to social values instead of mere profit maximization. Drawing on three in-depth case studies of European search engines, it analyzes how search engine developers counter-imagine hegemonic search, what social values support their imaginaries, and how they are intertwined with their sociotechnical practices. This analysis shows that notions like privacy, independence, and openness appear to be fluid, context-dependent, and changing over time, leading to a certain “value pragmatics” that allows the projects to scale beyond their own communities of practice. It further shows how European values, and broader notions of Europe as “unified or pluralistic,” are constructed and co-produced with developers’ attempts to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search. To conclude, I suggest three points of intervention that may help alternative search engine projects, and digital technologies more generally, to not only make their counter-imaginaries more powerful, but also acquire the necessary resources to build their technologies and infrastructures accordingly. I finally discuss how “European values,” in all their richness and diversity, can contribute to this undertaking.

This special issue focuses on Google as an object of critical study and European interventions that increasingly strive to counteract its dominance. Grounded in empirical case studies, it traces the politics of search engines to its very beginning by revisiting Brin’s and Page’s “mixed motives” of the PageRank algorithm and how they contributed to surveillance capitalism. It analyses search engine bias and discrimination by focusing on “data voids” and how they may potentially be filled with extreme right-wing sources, as well as the patching of “offensive results”, both past and present. It poses the question of how Google’s ubiquity is complicit in the creation of ignorance in the context of the climate crisis. Beyond the critique, it finally investigates how providers of alternative search engines counter-imagine hegemonic search and what interventions may help these projects to grow out of their niches, especially in Europe where social values and fundamental rights are strongly upheld in policy rhetoric. The special issue closes with two commentaries embedding “the State of Google Critique and Intervention” in larger discussions on the ethical dimensions of Google Autocomplete and the political economy of technical systems.

A plethora of health apps and tracking devices is used around the globe to measure, store, and process body data. In this article, we use various approaches from the fields of science and technology studies (STS), surveillance studies and medical sociology to grasp and theorize these global trends of body datafication in health-related contexts. We (re)introduce the post-digital concept of the data body as the intersection of online and offline, individual and collective, private and public aspects, emphasizing the entanglements of the physical body from its data- dimensions and its situatedness between empowerment and social control. We conclude by discussing aspects of ownership, care, and control of digital data bodies and how both individuals and society may cope with them in the future.