Contrary to conventional wisdom, apparently, search engines do not give big, prominent sites an unfair advantage over little ones. An item in the current issue of the Economist reports that Internet scientists studying the issue of search-engine rankings found that, to their surprise, search results do not create a vicious cycle in which popular Websites become even more popular, to the detriment of their less popular fellow sites. Just the opposite happens.
Researchers at Indiana University and the University of Bielefeld, Germany, tested two methods of navigating the Web, one in which people surfed using random links and another in which they only visited pages returned by search engine results. They discovered that the "supposed bias" in favor of popular pages did not exist. The pages returned by search engines were no more likely to be discovered and consequently linked to by others.
In their paper, "The Egalitarian Effect of Search Engines", the researchers write: "[C]ontrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web."
According to the Economist, the Net scientists' results may not yet resolve the question of search engine bias. At least one fellow scholar has said the test data used was poor and the methods flawed. So expect the debate to really take off from here.
<a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-and-order/law-and-order-criminal-intent.html">law and order criminal intent</a> <br /> <a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-and-order/law-and-order-game.html">law and order game</a> <br /> <a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-and-order/law-and-order-special-victim-unit.html">law and order special victim unit</a> <br /> <a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-and-order/law-and-order-svu.html">law and order svu</a> <br /> <a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-and-order/law-and-order.html">law and order</a> <br /> <a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-degree/business-degree-law-online.html">business degree law online</a> <br /> <a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-degree/business-law-degree.html">business law degree</a> <br /> <a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-degree/career-with-a-law-degree.html">career with a law degree</a> <br /> <a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-degree/criminal-law-degree.html">criminal law degree</a> <br /> <a href="http://republika.pl/zadnaslafa/law-degree/degree-enforcement-law-online.html">degree enforcement law online</a> <br />
THE EGALITARIAN SEARCH ENGINE
Contrary to conventional wisdom, apparently, search engines do not give big, prominent sites an unfair advantage over little ones. An item in the current issue of the Economist reports that Internet scientists studying the issue of search-engine rankings found that, to their surprise, search results do not create a vicious cycle in which popular Websites become even more popular, to the detriment of their less popular fellow sites. Just the opposite happens.
Researchers at Indiana University and the University of Bielefeld, Germany, tested two methods of navigating the Web, one in which people surfed using random links and another in which they only visited pages returned by search engine results. They discovered that the "supposed bias" in favor of popular pages did not exist. The pages returned by search engines were no more likely to be discovered and consequently linked to by others.
In their paper, "The Egalitarian Effect of Search Engines", the researchers write: "[C]ontrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web."
According to the Economist, the Net scientists' results may not yet resolve the question of search engine bias. At least one fellow scholar has said the test data used was poor and the methods flawed. So expect the debate to really take off from here.