Search Engines and Linking

Nikhil Bhowmick 02/08/07
Global Internet Professor Bernhard Rieder

"How do search engines direct attention and what are the ensuing political and cultural issues?"

Jill Walker's article " Links and Power: the Political Economy of Linking on the Web," starts off with an explanation on how Google's page ranking system uses linking as a primary method of attributing visibility to a website. As such, the process of linking has become synoymous with a value-based transaction, also known as the economy of links. For example the author refers to te online game Everquest, which is known to have members buy links - and thus value - from "link farms". However, althouh the internet now has its own economy based on a sort of "currency" that has crucial impacts on commercial interests and cultural values in the real world, it still does not have the possibility of being exchanged against any type of real currency. Walker also states Foucault and his idea that power dynamics alway include knowledge. As a result, considering that links are value-based and thereby represent power, they subsequently represent the way in which information is accessed and processed on the web.

Similarly, J.D Lasica's article "Balancing power: How News Portals serve up political stories" discusses the power of search engines to link and thus attribute rank to websites. In this specific case, the author discusses Google and Yahoo, the two major search engines, and their news search engines. Lasica points out that while Yahoo News is a search engine that relies on more than a hundred news partners - mostly major news organizations - and an internal editorial staff that is responsible for the selection of the news, while Google relies on computer algorithms for its news search engine. Lasica gives the example of the US presidential elections of 2004, which turned up much more biased or one-sided media websites for John Kerry than for George W. Bush. The problem, it seemed, was that Google's algorithmic model, which sought to include all types of views at the media dinner table, was facing a glitch; when people typed in Kerry, it took them straight to big media organizations that usually omit politicians' (and celebrities') first name in their headline and body. In contrast, it is the small, less fair and balanced, or conservative websites that use full names, such as "John Kerry" in their content when they want to add derision to injury. In addition, the process of trolling, that consists of hopping from site to site to get news, as in the case of Google, only results in slower news updates. In addition, Yahoo's editorial staff has the ability to not only select the news that they deem worthy, but do so on Yahoo News' page, so they can supplement it and categorize content in opinion, straight news and in-depth analyses categories. Meanwhile, Google's vision of an all-inclusive media spectrum is flawed because it mixes up personal opinions resulting from blogs and alternative news websites, that slow the reader in his process of filtering and selecting the news.

Judging from this information, what this entails politically and culturally is that Google News' algorithm-based system of selecting the news via linking will gear news websites to further use the algorithms loophools in order to promote a biased pageranking. Nevertheless, links being values, the idea of being able to influence a search engine's algorithmic model in order to tip the balance in favor of a certain political criteria when searching news online is connected to the commercial aspect of links. As a result, links are economic as well as political power. They can be bought and manipulated in order to emphasize one political candidate's image or agenda over the other.

Culturally speaking, the economy of links is also changing social dynamics through its ability to to create peer endorsement and online business-models. Via linking, a specific website not only gains a sort of economic value (based on links as the currency), it also subsequently gains a certain amount of capital or value within its website community. The value it gains via linking thus acts as the financial currency. This form of crossover between virtual network value and real world monetary systems doesn't not necessarily pose a problem. In doing so, however, it illustrates the argument that there is a mutual dependence between real world economic as well as cultural matters and virtuall network values. In addition, Google's development of the Pagerank via linking has also created a form of redirecting attention that requires another form of social dynamics absent from the physical world. In the virtual realm of the internet, attention is now directed at a faster and shorter speed, but like any other medium, it may direct the web user to unsollicited content.