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Web search engines: Are they “info-mediaries” or “censor-mediares” manipulated by “invisible forces”?

Whatever browser you use to access the Internet, (Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari etc.) there is a search engine’s bar where you type keyword to reach the worldwide information database. The direct typing of a URL is, any longer, an unusual and rare action. Ten years ago, I remembered myself typing, randomly, URLs on the browser. Nowadays, this is an old-fashioned method. “Infomediaries” have changed the way of browsing. What are the impacts of web search engines in our life? Are there “invisible forces” which interfere against the “neutrality” of the Internet?

We are living in the Information age lead by the Internet. A virtual world is out there and counts over 1.7 billion “cytizens”. It reflects somehow our physical world’s picture. Analogically to the global population, Asia (over 738million users) and Europe (418 million users) incorporate the highest Internet user population followed by North America. The majority of Western civilization’s people have created a personal colony on the Web. Moreover, the penetration rates depict a clear dominance of North America (74.2%), with Oceania/Australia (62.4%) and Europe (52.0%) to follow. On the other hand, only 6.8% of the overall population has internet access in Africa!

From 2000 to 2009, the global penetration growth rate reached 380%! This networked overpopulation affects the procreation of our digital offspring, the websites. The amount of them is still an obscure and undiscoverable issue. Every day, some of them come into this world and others depart from it. The social networking has contributed in this scene. There are sources which argue that there are up to 206.7 million sites and some search engines claim that they have indexed over 700 million websites.

The only sure factor in all these statistics provided above is that the role of web search engines has become extremely vital in our life. The web anarchy had to be controlled in some way. So, like in every other type of community, humans “invented” and applied laws though mechanisms. These mechanisms manage the existing information overload with a new kind of lawyers, named “infomediaries” like Google, Yahoo, and Bing (Microsoft). They facilitate our information search “giving” us, implicitly, access to the Net.

The applied regulations are structured around “spiders” which use algorithms to crawl websites’ contents, as in the case of Google. On the other side, in the case of Yahoo, there is an “indexing department” where employees are playing the role of “cyber lawyer”. In both cases, mathematics and human interpretation embed subjectivity and delusions. As Thomas Brackett cites “one of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation”.

Is it irrelevant the fact that the Google’s slogan is “Don’t be evil”? It is logical sequent to wonder about how accurate and reliable their search results are and which “invisible forces” manipulate them. The hot supporters of the democratic nature of the Web are under examination like those who were claiming about TV and radio’s empowering capacities during 1920s.

Academic and business world is concerned about the search engines’ biases. There is wariness about the general practices of crawling, indexing and ranking and the limitations of the human made algorithms that they adopt. Google makes three to four hundred algorithmic changes affecting the ranking sequence. They argue that this is part of their philosophy trying to optimize continuously its optimization. On the other hand, a dark side of search engines’ indexing policy exists. The search engine optimization (SEO) engages the firms’ marketing departments in an attempt to dominate online. For some of them, there is an unfair competition because “the big fish eat the small one”.

On one hand, the location of the website, the number of “backlinks” and the “PageRank” metric play an important role in the page’s indexing. The “backlinks” refer to the number of other Web sources which reference your page, while the “PageRank” is associated with the reputation of the linked sites. On the other hand, some search engines allow you to pay for a high ranking position or SEO services. At the same time, these companies (like Bing) argue that for hacking reasons they hide part of their policy.

In summary, the whole “idea” of the internet has been rapidly changed after the entrance of the commercialization notion in its potentials. Commercial exploitation of the Net was evolved as a consequence of the network effects. As more users are connected to this medium the potential of it is increasing. Nowadays, every organization’s Marketing department is staffed by employees responsible for online strategy (advertisement or commerce).

Firms are part of the “cyber game” and try to be the champions. If a company achieves to be ranked high in a famous search engine like Yahoo, then its future is seems to be brilliant. This game takes place constantly and involves unfair competing practices. Enterprises hire web experts in an attempt to “scupper” its rivals. Their goal is to be ranked higher than other companies even if their products and services are not so relevant to the user’s initial keywords.

On the other hand, firms which provide search services are seeking for profit respectively. For example, “AdWords” is Google’s advertising flagship and its main source of revenues. It offers promotional services for organizations which would like to advertise their products on the Web. According to these, the engines’ results are biased, many times the first page of them is full of commercial websites and some of them are not so relevant to what you are looking for.

Taking as an example Google.com, it doesn’t promote its search services explicitly but there is everywhere a Google’s advertisement. What I mean by this is the fact that by typing “Search engines” the results don’t include Google’s engine in the first page. On the other hand, it depicts Altavista, Bing and Lycos which constitutes its competitors.

The role of governments

Other forces like governments influence search engines’ policies. The investigation of the social, economic and political motivations, hidden behind them, is very interesting.

A recent experiment assessed the behavioral bias of people using the search engines. They designed an interface, same to Google engine but they programmed it to reverse the Google’s normal relevance order to examine the changes in users’ options. The experiment demonstrated the partially bias of the people who continued to trust the sites that were resulted firstly in the sequence. This phenomenon constitutes a social impact of the search engines which exploit the “statistical truth” in which the user is looking for the first satisfied result to his query without making a deeper research.

Search engines have changed the way that people are searching and evaluate the information. Users don’t access even the third screen of thousand/million results. They have badly camped in the offered ease of access and it is pretty painful for them to read a long article or book. We can claim that, generally, search engines have “redirect” the way of thinking. A couple of years before, a researcher had to spend a lot of time inside libraries to find the appropriate sources of his topic. Nowadays, a few minutes search is able to give you a lot of insights in a particular issue.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from lack of concentration and he decided to buy a typewriter in order to keep him focused. After a period, he managed to write his thoughts even with his eyes closed. Some time, a friend of him sent a letter where he argued that the typewriter had affected the way of depicting his thoughts. The way of writing was more telegraphic and tight. Nietzsche responded to him by saying: “You are right our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Likewise, our search equipment influences our reading style and the form of the information we expect to find!

The role of search services providers

Furthermore, a primary source of bias stems from the fact that search engines belong to commercial enterprises which seek profits. Their revenues derive from the bargaining of the informational treasure which is stored within their databases. An example of this bargaining process is that of the endless conflicts between Google and Chinese government.

In 2006, Google decided to “censor itself” by excluding results from its Chinese version, Google.cn. These results were reflecting sensitive terms and web sites. Hence, topics such as “Independence for Taiwan” and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre are filtered and they have controlled results. Even BBC was blocked at the beginning! “Google is a business, businesses tend to want to maximize profits” Rich C, Skye and Bonn replied. It was a mandate from Google’s “huge customer”, China. In order to avoid its withdrawal, Google responded because, otherwise, it could be a great blow to its reputation leaving the most rapidly developing Internet society. China counts over 384 million internet users by December of 2009.

“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google's mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission…” Google statement argued on BBC news.

Moreover, the struggle between the most profitable company in this field and the most internet populated country in the world, China, continues to draw the media’s attention. In January, a series of security infrastructure attacks took place in China. Gmail accounts which belong to Chinese activists were target and hacked stealing intellectual property. Chinese Government has restricted the results of queries including “human rights” and other sensitive topics related to activism.

In addition, a fake Google search engine named “Goojje.com” was emerged. It is a website created by a female Chinese student that looks like the Google.com and it is clear that it has imitated the Google’s logo. All these incidents strain the relations between these two global giants.

On 23th of March, Google took an evolutional decision to stop censoring its search engine’s results by redirecting the visitors of the Chinese version, Google.cn, to a new direction, Google.com.hk. This is an attempt to refocus on its mission which aims to offer uncensored results and overcomes the Chinese restricted laws. This is a risky decision with unpredictable consequences. Already, Chinese government is disappointed because it argues that Google broke a “written promise”. This promise refers to the agreement of filtering its results following the government’s suggestions. The cyber war is under way!

Countries’ impacts

Another source of bias is the censorship that particular countries dictate as a result of political and historical issues, diverse culture, and social norms. Search engines are not free worldwide; they are hosted by local Internet service providers (ISP). Therefore, they must comply with the national laws and follow the government’s suggestions to remain in a particular country. For example, Baidu.Inc is a Chinese search services provider which includes 700 million pages but it censors its content in line with the national regulation.

A very interesting creation which depicts the consequences of national censorship is a website named “CenSEARCHip”. It gives you the opportunity to compare the different results of search engines between four countries, China, France, Germany and United States. Apart from China, France and Germany have followed censorial practices, for example they have both blocked neo-Nazi hate sites. Deductively, every nation tries to hide historical incidents or other sensitive data encroaching the free flow of information by applying mandatory laws to control the government criticism.

Religions’ impact

Furthermore, the censorship has not “escaped” from the religious intervention. There are sophisticated search engines called “religious search engines” which follow “rules” emanated from a particular religion. Apart from Google, Yahoo and Bing, there are Christian, Islamic and Jewish search services! Seekfind.org is a known example of a Christian search engine.

A recently released Islamic search engine is ImHalal.com. ImHalal.com has Muslims as a target group of users providing safety "to surf the internet without the fear of accidentally encountering sinful material". The engine rates the searcher’s query using a “haram scale” from 0 to 3. “Haram” means that the content of the information is against the religious canons of Islam. The opposite word is “Halal”. According to the scale’s result, it informs the user for the degree of risk to access the results. For example, if your query rates from 0 to 2 “haram”, you can decide to move forward or not, but if it rates 3 then it yields a message:

"Oops! Your search inquiry has a haram level of 3 out of 3! I would like to advise you to change your search terms and try again"!

It doesn’t censor information about topics which criticizes Islam like the previous Muslims’ search engines (like IslamicGoogle.com) but it exhibits gender bias. The most significant thing is that it rates polygamy as “haram” when it is sanctioned by the Koran!

A “taste” from the Future

It is difficult to forecast the future progress of the internet search trends but it looks like a dominance of search engines’ providers until something revolutionary happens. The whole structure of online information’s distribution is structured around the “appetites” of three or four famous “infomediaries”. These are the gateways to reach the global news!

The online neutrality seems to be a weak tie under those conditions. Go further, what do you think will be the result of a forthcoming merger between Google, Yahoo and Bing? Historically, oligarchy or monarchy tends to be linked with the “black pages” of humanity, especially, for free speech and information distribution.

A science fiction’s scenario could be a reality in the future. A similar story like what George Orwell describes in his novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Now, search engines are absolutely inextricable part of our information searching. They are in our life and they have implicitly changed the way we are looking for, evaluate and read informational sources. “Don’t be evil” (Google’s slogan) could be linked with the phrase “Big brother is watching you” which was part of the government’s propaganda in the novel. A complete surveillance of global information will change the Google’s slogan to “I’m an evil” and search engines will substitute the state’s abused power.

Generally, experimentation with search engines is a very interesting activity. By inputting “online shopping” you notice that both Bing and Yahoo present “Tesco” in the first page’s results. Also, Google and Lycos bring “ebay” and “overstock.com”. It is not a fortuitous event because if you look carefully in the sponsors’ bar, they are also there!

Deductively, the democratic nature of the internet world is under tribulation and brings to mind a chaotic and irrational phenomenon due to its creation and evolution by and for “(ir) rational men”. “All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth”, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Conclusion

The Net is not an isolated world; it is used by humans and operates like our physical world. Subjectivity and universality of Web’s information medium is a “functional delusion”. “Invisible forces” like governments, profits, religious beliefs and others pull the strings and we must be aware of the censored search engines. Information overloads, and at the opposite, the “web regulations” to resolve them result in the increase of complexity.