Vviewpoints

I M A G E B Y A L I C I A K U B I S T A / A N D R I J B O R Y S A S S O C I A T E

S Search Engine Bias?

From the users’ point of view, search
engines are reliable and trustworthy
sources, providing fair and unbiased
results. 8 However, it has been found
that search results simply should not
be considered “neutral.” Some schol-
ars argue that an unbiased search en-
gine is simply not possible, as there is
no ideal result set against which a bias
can be measured. 5, 6 Therefore, I argue
Google alone now serves over two tril-
lion search queries per year. 11 While
there seems to be a multitude of search
engines on the market, there are only
a few relevant search engines in terms
of them having their own index (the
database of Web pages underlying a
search engine). Other search engines
pull results from one of these search
engines (for example, Yahoo pulls re-
sults from Bing), and should therefore
not be considered search engines in
the true sense of the word. Globally,
the major search engines with their
own indexes are Google, Bing, Yandex,
and Baidu. Other independent search
engines may have their own indexes,
but not to the extent that their size
makes them competitive in the global
search engine market.

While the search engine market in
the U.S. is split between Google and
Bing (and its partner Yahoo) with ap-
proximately two-thirds to one-third,
respectively, 10 in most European coun-
tries, Google accounts for more than

90% of the market share. As this situation has been stable over at least the last 10 years, there have been discussions about how much power Google has over what users get to see from the Web, as well as about anticompetitive business practices, most notably in the context of the European Commission’s competitive investigation into the search giant. 3

Viewpoint
The Web Is Missing
an Essential Part
of Infrastructure:
An Open Web Index

A proposal for building an index of the Web that separates the infrastructure part of the search engine—the index—from the services part that will form the basis for myriad search engines and other services utilizing Web data on top of a public infrastructure open to everyone.

DOI: 10.1145/3312479