[Air-L] Search Engines and Social Science: A Revolution in the Making

[Sarah Ann Oates]

If you research and/or teach on issues relating to internet search, you may be interested in:

Search Engines and Social Science: A Revolution in the Making
By Filippo Trevisan at the University of Glasgow.

This policy paper covers main points and presents additional research out of the Google Forum meetings in London. It was funded as part of a UK Economic and Social Research Council Knowledge Exchange Grant (Civic Consumers or Commercial Citizens?: Social Scientists Working with Google to Better Understand Online Search Behaviour).

Download here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2265348

Key points:
n Google Trends is an especially promising tool that could enable academics to explore new questions.
n Ever since the internet became commercially available in the mid-1990s, search engines have played a crucial role in orienting online traffic, distributing content and constructing knowledge.
n While in the past scholars had been more interested in talking about the role of search engines themselves in shaping society, this approach is being increasingly complemented by work that focuses on how search engines can augment academic research in general.
n It is crucial that academics investigate opportunities and challenges in the centrality of search engines in contemporary informational patterns and social interaction.
n Emerging strands of research using search-engine tools/data productively include politics and public opinion studies; economics and business; public health and epidemiology; and response/reaction to natural disasters.
n Google Trends data offers advantages over traditional social-science methods such as public opinion surveys. It provides enhanced opportunities to study crisis situations as well as the general relationship between offline events and online behaviour.
n Applications such as Google Trends could provide unprecedented opportunities for examining the connections between new and old media.
n The global dimension of Google Trends as well as the geographical filters that can be applied to its output can facilitate international research by providing comparable data at virtually no cost, thus substantially expanding the scope for social-science research across country boundaries.
n Scholars should be aware of the potential drawbacks associated with this emerging methodology, including doubts over data representativeness when generalising from search engine users to an entire population; language differences and “country effects” in relation to search; as well as limited flexibility afforded by Google Trends.

Sincerely
Sarah Oates
ESRC Grant Principal


Professor and Senior Scholar
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
University of Maryland
2100L Knight Hall
College Park, MD 20742
Phone: 301-405-4510
Email: soates at umd.edu
www.media-politics.com<http://www.media-politics.com>

See an excerpt from my new book -- Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere, 2013, Oxford University Press at http://goo.gl/HTcDd