Search engines

"How do search engines direct attention and what are the ensuing political and cultural issues?" by Marcello Arcucci-Dedina

Search engines are at the core of information gathering on the internet, because of the power they hold over visits and visibility of the sites. The basic principle of ranking in search engines is related to links: the more links you get, the better your rank, and therefore the more chances you have to show up in a search. Although the formula is a lot more complicated, mostly to avoid link-farms and cheating the system, this is the basic principle. Visits for a website are currency, and revenue is directly connected to the number of visits, through the advertisement displayed and clicked. Because a large portion of the visits of a site comes from other sites directly (linking) or indirectly (PageRank based on linking) linking becomes a commodity that can be traded, and why not sold. Although currently there is little activity when it comes to actually selling linking, link trading is very common. This is the reason for comments on blogs and discussion boards linking to random, unrelated sites. Google has however modified the algorithm to disregard “cheating” and brings the PageRank down to 0. It is not hard to imagine that commercial sites with a high PageRank, and whose linking is therefore more valuable, would sell the opportunity to link to another site. However such practices would make them loose credibility in the Internet community and therefore the decision would have to be carefully made...

When it comes to news, there is a difference depending on the search engine that is used, and therefore the methods of influencing information are very different. Yahoo! News uses a team of editors, real life humans that find, verify and and publish the news. Google news has a very different approach, they use algorithms in order to find the news on the internet. with no human action in the process, besides for the actual coding of the algorithm. Each of these systems has strength and weaknesses, in the case of Google, the main disadvantage, from a first look is the fact that news will be delayed and will not show up on google news instantly, and might not show up at all. this is due to the fact that the algorithm define the worthiness of the news partially on the number of sources reporting it, therefor creating a delay in breaking news. Because of the algorithm using several thousands of sites, Google News offers a better representation of different and non-mainstream point of views and media. The problem with that can be an over-representation of certain ideas. The article gives the example of research about John Kerry, that turned up a very high percentage of small right extremist websites. Although the explanation was related to the use of the first name or the last name only, the problem remain. In an age where news is increasingly obtained through these services, the algorithms or editorial staffs have enormous power over the penetration of news. They literally choose the information that will be distributed, and in political terms this can tremendously change the outcome of an election.