A New Way of Searching: Retrieving the Unexpected
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-alternative-search-engines.html
With the emergence of the world wide web, the transfer of information has moved away from the linear style information storage, such as computer memory, libraries, etc. These are all examples of information being collected in some sequential order. Now, with the power of search engines, information mimics our conscious experience of thinking, or associative memory. Vannevar Bush envisioned a prototype of the world wide web called the “Memex”, which functioned a lot like a global brain. Ever since then, search engines like Google and Bing have become the avenue of choice for information. No longer to people have to manually sort through folders or stare at bookshelves of information to find what they need.
Joshua Cohen, an American novelist, wrote for the New York Times an article detailing his experience with less popular search engines. Search Engines such as Mystery Seeker come with a twist: instead of returning the result of what you searched, you get the result of the last query given to the site. This results in some unexpected search results appearing, ranging from conspiracy theories, Nazi time travel, and searches about a TV show.
I think this article presents an interesting perspective on the ideology of search engines. Because of this new method of retrieving information, people are only digesting information that they are looking for. No longer are people stumbling upon information that is unexpected or unwanted. The result of this is people digesting information in a very biased fashion. If people don’t want to read about more conservative viewpoints, they don’t need to. It is very easy to filter it out.
Overall, this article displays a peculiar twist on the topics that we have talked about in class recently, especially with searching and information networks regarding the internet. Throughout Chapter 13 and 14, the web is presented as a very stable and easy to navigate network of information. However, it is interesting to take note of how search engines like Mystery Seeker turn this network on its head. How would a search engine such as this affect the presentation of the Web as a directed graph? I think that would be a very cool diagram to materialize and then compare with the original.