[Air-l] Fwd: politics and ideology of search engines

[Nancy Baym]

>nisaacson at sociology.rutgers.edu wrote:
>>
>>  Perhaps the list can give me some suggestions for discovering more about the
>>  politics and ideological approaches of specific search engines...

Quentin followed:

>I think that Google uses a number of approaches that come from the
>recommender systems literature (and associated patents).  In regards to
>incoming links.  This strikes me as a particular social perspective as
>does social / collaborative filtering in general.

There was an interesting article recently in salon.com about blogging 
distorting google. The author argued that bloggers tend to link to 
one another's sites significantly more than normal, so blog sites are 
more likely to have lots of links to them than other kinds of web 
pages. Since google ranks your hits at least in part by how many 
other pages link to a site, the argument is that blogs are likely to 
show up much higher in the search results than other pages, with the 
possible social consequence of granting bloggers increased 
prominence/credibility in public discourse.
________________________________________________________
Nancy Baym 	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
102 Bailey, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org