Search Engine Results Relatively Fair 100
perkr writes "The Economist and PhysicsWeb report on a study from Indiana
University claiming that search engines have an egalitarian effect
that gives new pages a greater chance to be discovered, compared to
what would be the case in the absence of search engines. Based on an
analysis of Web traffic and topology, this result contradicts the
widely held 'Googlearchy' hypothesis according to which search engines
amplify the rich-get-richer dynamics of the Web."
google good (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're searching for something obscure, Google will instantly tell you the one startup company building it. On the other hand, if you want something mainstream, they'll give you a prioritized list of the best sources. There's no alterior motive it seems - they just give you what you searched for... imagine that! I've seen a business through from obscure geek hack to the mainstream consumer, and Google has been there at every step of the way, working exactly as users expect. To accuse them of favoring any particular stratum of that chain is awfully unfouned IMHO unless there are some specific examples. Indeed, answering users' needs instead of pandering to the status quo seems to be he most valuable bit of what google does.
Re:google good (Score:3, Insightful)
First, I'm not sure that this statement is even true; sure, Google has lots of PhDs, but whether as many as ten of them are actually doing research about searching is not so clear. Managing researchers is even harder than managing programmers.
Second, not all PhDs are created equal. Some do brilliant research both as graduate students and thereafter; others barely manage to achieve a degree with a great deal of assistance from their supervisors, go into industry, and never do any significant research. Certainly Google has some brilliant reseachers, but given that it tends to hire new PhDs before they've had a chance to prove themselves, I'm sure they're also have a lot of dead weight.
Finally, "crunching" a problem doesn't get you anywhere. Ideas either happen or they don't -- if anything, working too hard on a problem will diminish research output rather than increase it.
Re:Let's try a thought experiment... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because the alternative to having search engines is much worse does not make Google an egalitarian influence by default. It is the least worst solution, definitely, and one I for one can happily live with, but we are still in a situation where if (when?) Google decides to jump ship and to start promoting some sites more than others for personal/financial/sexual favors, we end up in a situation identical to the first one, but in a much less obvious way. So, even if the answer to the question is "mmm... yes" today, it doesn't mean it has (or will) stay like that forever.
Hardly Egalitarian (Score:0, Insightful)
It's also not Egalitarian because Egalitarianism assumes all people are equal, so company of 100,000 employees is 10,000 more important than a company of 10 employees.
It's more like positive discrimination, you discriminate against big companies for your own benefit and pretend its for some greater moral purpose.
In the same way positive discrimination for blacks is really just negative discrimination against whites, spun to sound like a good thing.
Re:My experience bears this out also (Score:5, Insightful)
I've made sites with fairly mainstream content before, which were totally ignored by Google
That is precisely what the "rich get richer" effect is about. This study seems to be measuring the wrong thing. Of course your mainstream site is going to get a few hits from Google because your site mentions something in some quirky way that other sites don't. However, because there are already 10,000 sites about what you have written, you will never get into the top ten search results. Google puts sites near the front of the SERPs because they have lots of incoming links. Sites that are in the top will get a lot more traffic and some percent of that traffic links to them. Sites at the bottom, get few new incoming links.
Yes those few visitors that you are getting from Google are more visitors than you would get if Google did not exists, but that says nothing about the relative number of visitors that your competitors are getting.
I don't buy it (Score:4, Insightful)
But beyond that, common sense alone tells you winner takes all, and it continues to be that way, with google or with anyone else.
The entire pageranking algorythm is there to point you to the most likely result you're looking for. They base that on popularity, number of links coming in, and the importance of the referring sites linking you. The net effect is, the more popular you are, the more relevent you become and the higher ranked you are.
Also, when you type in say "windows" Google automatically assumes you're talking about the Windows OS. What if you were looking for real windows? The search engines are always assumming based on popular demand. This steers people's thoughts and pushes them in a non-neutral direction. As a word's context changes to favor a certain direction, search engines rank that as more relevent, which leads to it being more favorable, etc. Cycle repeats.
Re:An example of poor Google performance (Score:3, Insightful)
Not true at all. Insider screenshots of Google's special internal interfaces to employees show that they actually have a human driven spam filtering services. They basically display a page at a time and have the user rate how likely they think it is spam. I can't remember where I saw the screenshots, so I can't find them.
When Google claims to have 28,600 results, in fact there are only 36. Now that's a con.
Did you read the disclaimer at the end? Google excludes many results if they're too similar. You can click that link at the end to show all of the 28k+ results if you like, but it would be rather pointless. This tends to happen when google indexes things like web forums. Because of the way links to forum threads work, you get a lot of overlapping content, and google is simply smart enough to identify it as overlapping content and just count it as one hit.
Mod (-5) Google bashing. No. This applies to all the search engines.
You'll probably be moderated down for spreading misinformation and not actually bothering read this message at the end: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." If those are spam as you say, I think google did a good job by omitting many thousands of spam sites.
Re:My experience bears this out also (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue, of course, is how we measure how useful content is. Since computers currently aren't that good at analyzing the actual content we have to instead rely on other metrics. Such as popularity, number of links, referrals, and whatever other madness google is currently using. It may not be optimal, but it's certainly much better than other systems we may have. Being on the front page of google for a mainstream subject is certainly rewarding. However, it is still POSSIBLE to displace a page by increasing the visibility of your content organically (such as getting it into the blogosphere) and thus eventually moving yourself onto that highly valuable first page.
For proof of the process you only need to look at the various lawsuits filed against google by companies/individuals who saw their page moved from the front by other more useful sites. I think that google is a highly valuable tool that brings a lot of order to an otherwise chaotic web.