Search Engines and Society
In the current digital era, we have many new technologies that have revolutionized and modernized the way many perform traditional processes. One such process that has been reinvented is the processes of learning about and researching topics. Where previously people would visit libraries and talk to a librarian to learn about information or would learn things from talking and physically interacting with people, now, with the internet, individuals are able to leverage an entire network of interconnected people and databases of information from places they have never visited to get answers to their questions. With so many different resources available through the internet, people needed a way to sift through this information to find links and resources that are connected to what they were looking for. Thus, the search engine was created to solve this problem and succinctly get its users the information they want.
Today, many people use search engines multiple times a day to get the answers they need. Caitlin Dewey, a writer for The Washington Post, recently published an article that raised questions about relying upon internet search engines to dictate what we see and use for our sources and what information we deem as important. She writes that there is a worry among those who study humans and their interactions that search engines, which make the incredibly large network of the internet manageable, may be becoming too influential and in the future be used as a form of “Social Control.” As we learned in class search engines use a network based method to decide what information to show and what order to show the information. Things like direct links add a perceived value to a site; in a search engine, sites with the highest number of highly valued linkages are ranked above those with fewer of these types of links. Thus, one worry about our steady reliance upon search engines to filter information is that users, who don’t understand the internet as a network and the valuation of the nodes within this network by search engines, might assume that the first few options produced by a search engine have the best information. However, the network system shows that the first websites are ranked the best based on the number of links and the value of these linkages, but that doesn’t mean that the top sites are the best sites to answer a particular search query or the sites with the best information. The high value and larger number of links sometimes just mean that a site is popular. This unintended consequence of search engines could be detrimental to society by limiting the information people pay attention to and by creating potential areas of future exploitation if search engine technology fell into the wrong hands. Thus, this phenomenon seems to suggest that greater instruction in needed to educate the public about how networks operate and how specifically search engines operate. Therefore, while search engines are great for sifting through large amounts of data, the easy and simplistic nature of search engines, in the absence of further education of the public, could in the future potentially cause great harm to our society.
Image Source: http://creationaura.com/search-engine-optimization/
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/03/23/what-you-dont-know-about-internet-algorithms-is-hurting-you-and-you-probably-dont-know-very-much/