Doi: 10.1145/1839676.1839695
Concerns about biased manipulation of search
results may require intervention involving
government regulation.
By PatRicK VoGL anD michaeL BaRRett
Regulating the
information
Gatekeepers
IN 2003, 2BIgFee T, an Internet business specializing
in the sale of oversize shoes ranked among the top
results in Google searches for its products. Its prime
location on the virtual equivalent of new York’s high-end
shopping mecca Fifth Avenue brought a steady stream
of clicks and revenue. But success was fleeting:
That November, Google’s engineers
modified their search engine’s algorithms, an update later dubbed “
Florida” by the search-engine community.
2bigfeet’s rankings dropped abruptly
just before the Christmas selling season, and this Internet success story
was suddenly on the brink of bankruptcy. 2
Search engines have established
themselves as critical gatekeepers
of information. However, despite an
increasingly monopolistic Internet
search market, they and the implicit
filtering process in their rankings remain largely beyond public scrutiny
and control. This has inspired us to
explore an increasingly topical question: Should search-engine ranking be
regulated?
Search engines generally work by
indexing the Web through so-called
crawler programs. When a user types
in a request, search algorithms deter-
mine the most relevant results in the
index. Although the precise workings
of these algorithms are kept at least as
secret as Coca-Cola’s formula they are
usually based on two main functions:
keyword analysis (for evaluating pages
along such dimensions as frequency
of specific words) and link analysis
(based on the number of times a page
is linked to from other sites and the
rank of these other sites) (see Figure 1).
key;insights
With search engines guiding access to
critical Web-based information flow,
many users are increasingly concerned
over possible targeted manipulation of
search results.
With markets and technology both
unlikely to ensure unbiased results,
regulation may be the only alternative.
one promising way forward is
clearer guidelines for search-engine
optimization through self-regulation.