Brett is a newly divorced father of a child in infant school, and a toddler. He shares custody of the children equally with his partner. Brett spoke to me about how searching Google for advice on toddler behaviour often comes up with different search results for him and his ex-wife. Brett says to me that most of the results he sees are to do with naughty steps and more ‘old fashioned’ approaches to toddler tantrums for instance. But he notices that his ex-wife's search results are more aligned to what he calls ‘gentle parenting’. He says:

As Bilić (2016) notes, ‘web search is much less a culture of significance which the users themselves have spun, to paraphrase Geertz (1973), and much more a culture that one of the most powerful and influential information and communication technology companies has engineered behind closed doors’ (p 7). Against this broader backdrop of algorithmic ideology and power, what do parents’ bottom-up practices, negotiations and even management of search look like? How does search fit into parenthood? Decades of scholarship have considered how parents seek information and advice online and the various sources from which this information and advice comes (Jang et al, 2015; Sage et al, 2018; Avery and Park, 2021; Kubb and Foran, 2020).