Influence of Search Engines Christina Pong cs349

Introduction The web is meant to be the ideal tool of a democratic society- anyone can say anything We find information on the web through search engines, directories, or by clicking on links on other web pages Search engines define what we see on the web, but in 2000, the total coverage only added up to roughly 42%. Today the number is even lower. How do search engines decide what users will see?

Search Engines and Directories Search Engines index using keywords Robots search URLs  Backlink Metric  PageRank Metric  Location Metric Directories  Human gatekeepers  Yahoo’s “Criteria of relevancy” Logos taken from their respective websites

Ranking Concerns Top spots are the most coveted People use various techniques to improve their rankings  Web spamming- keyword stuffing  Paid advertisements  Buying keywords

Idealism vs Cynicism No one owns the web Public space Supports democracy Conveys information Narrows gap between “haves” and “have-nots”? Web leads to increased isolation, division, and reduced discourse “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those that own one” -A.J. Liebling, journalist

Introducing the Google archy Study (2003)  In 2000 a survey reported that 30% of users looked for political information on the web  Scholars assumed two things:  The web will generate lots of new, easily assessable content, which lowers the cost of information  The web will make it easier for people see information from lesser known sources, thereby increasing equality

Inbound Links Finding information by web surfing  The amount of traffic web sites through surfing is still based on inbound links Using Search Engines  Google’s PageRank system is based on inbound links and 85% of users reported using Google as their search engine  HITS algorithm uses “hubs” and “authorities”, but still produces similar ranking results

Concept of Googlearchy The cost of information and variety of content on the web is determined by link structure In general, a small handful of sites get a larger ratio of inbound links and therefore a larger amount of traffic Power-law relationship

Methods Created lists of top 200 political websites in six different categories from Yahoo and Google Used web crawlers to download all pages to a depth of four and classified them as “positive” or “negative” Support Vector Machine (SVM) Classifier

SVM

Results

Other Findings Significant amount of overlap in the pages found by Yahoo and Google Generally a small handful of sites at the top get more backlinks than all of the other sites put together Top sites are from long established interest groups

Also… Given the small diameter of the web, the shallow depth of most searches, high degree of overlap, and that search engines are designed to copy user behavior, they believe that their study covered almost all sites that matter for their categories Any site that is more than 3 clicks away from the top 200 on a Google or Yahoo search probably would not have much of an impact on politics

Study Conclusions People thought that the web’s effect on politics is that it would lower the cost of information thereby reducing inequality It lowers the cost, but due to Googlearchy, people to focus on only a few, heavily- linked sources

Food for Thought The web is valuable because there is so much information, but its size makes it hard to study An even less organized structure would be harder to navigate and it would be harder to find information While anyone can post to the web, for most people it’s like:  “Having the online equivalent of having their own talk show on public access television at 3:30 in the morning” -Matthew Hindman et al.

The web as a meritocracy- the idea a site must be good if everyone’s referencing it Backlinks are the currency of the web As a Result

What do to about the Monopoly? Market Dynamics  Yahoo argues that if users don’t like search engine results, they can just switch engines, which will encourage competitors to improve their own ranking systems  But so few people understand how engines work, so they wouldn’t know to switch

More Recently Does Googleopoly mean that Google is Evil? (Nov NY Times article) A study conducted in 2006 (Filippo Mencer et al) found that search engine results are becoming less influential because people are searching using more specific queries, which reveals the more obscure pages.

Sources Hindman, Matthew et al. Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web. March 31,  All charts and tables were taken from the Googlearchy paper Introna, Lucas and Helen Nissenbaum. Defining the Web: The Politics of Search Engines. IEEE Hansell, Saul. “Debating the Vices and Virtues of Google”. Nytimes.com. November 20, Mencer, Filippo et al. Googlearchy or Googlocracy? IEEE Spectrum. February /4/08.