Duck Duck Go(ogle): The Politics of Search

Jonathon Hutchinsonjonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au

@dhutchman

Don’t forget…

• We need a guest tweeter this week?• Use the #meco3602 hashtag during the

lecture to engage with the content• http://onlinemedia3602.wordpress.com/• FB page as conversation space: https://www.facebook.com/meco3602• Email your blog URL to me:

jonathon.huthinson@sydney.edu.au

Online Media week 6

Avoiding the Googlization of everything

Pew Internet Research Findings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_X6EyqXa2s

Highest ranking search engines .au

Hitwise, US 2014

How works

3 parts running on a distributed network of thousands of low-cost servers or ‘server farms’ = fast parallel

processing.

1. Googlebot - a web crawler application (‘spider’) that finds and fetches web pages.

2. The Indexer - sorts every word on every page and stores the resulting index of words in a huge database (includes ‘PageRank’ of links to your page)

3. The Query Processor - compares your search query to the index and recommends the most relevant documents

Google Juice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BNHR6IQJGZs

Google Juice

• Break into small groups of 5 or 6• If you are comfortable, Google yourself• Are the results surprising?• How do they relate to the Finklestein reading?

Economy of hyperlinks

• The economy of links is service oriented, and the service to you is acknowledged through your link.

• By linking to A, you pay A for giving your users content, lifting A’s PageRank in a search.

• Return links to your site lift your PageRank, adding to your financial value, inducing greater traffic…and potentially more links.

• So links have value. They are a recommendation to view and they convey authority…even where your content is critical of the linked site.

Google’s corporate ideology

1. Provide perfect search – an algorithm that allows internet content users to determine the ‘best’ possible results

2. Present your activities as ethical – “don’t be evil” ie. we will collect as much information as we can, but be trustworthy in its use

3. Present your activities as politically irreproachable – “democracy on the web works” or link votes equal representative value

Ethics of hyperlinks

Google search is not ‘impartial’ as: • rating pages with lots of inbound links can reinforce

the power of social networks and support information oligarchies

• results can be filtered to meet political ends• it can promote hate sites as easily as more balanced,

accurate sources• it does not acknowledge the advertorial linking that is

paid for by companies• it has reduced the power of the‘elite influencers’(e.g.

news organisations) who structure the value of information through news bulletin order, page placement etc.

The Google ‘Conspiracy’• For every search, Google saves IP number,

country and location, time, search terms

• From 2005, the US Administration has subpoenaed the search data of several search engines.

• From 2010 Google has been subject to national government scrutiny around the world for illegally collecting wireless network data in its Street View project

• From 2012 it is collating individuated user data across all its services

• Google is "a ticking privacy time bomb.“ Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center

• The NSA’s Prism surveillance program is proof of that ticking time bomb

The hidden web• The web had over 1 trillion URLs in 2008• People create several billion pages per day• Search engines only index a fraction of this

content• They don’t find material that is housed

- in databases that require passwords, or - on pages with few links, or - in pages that owners have deliberately excluded (eg. where media companies like News Ltd exclude their news from search).

Alternative search engines• Yippy – yippy.com

clustering search engines - which group semantically related information to increase the relevance.

• Voxalead - http://voxaleadnews.labs.exalead.com/multimedia speech transcription search - which searches inside the speech text of video and audio content

• Dogpile - http://www.dogpile.com/ metasearch engines - give search terms to other engines and collate their results (less likely to store results = greater privacy of search)

• Duck Duck Go – https://duckduckgo.com specialises ‘in protecting searcher’s privacy and avoiding the filter bubble’

A perfect search engine would deliver intuitive results based on users’ past searches and general browsing history…knowing, for example, whether a search for the keywords ‘Washington’ and ‘apple’ is meant to help a user locate Apple Computer stores in Washington, D.C. or nutritional information about the Washington variety of the fruit.

(Zimmer, First Monday, 2008)

Semantic search engines

Why ‘Search’ for an entire week?

• To improve your ability to source and find information

• To use alternative sources to locate information in the ‘hidden’ web

• Use your new found search power for good (of your investigative journalism projects)

Conclusion

• Understanding the contexts in which information is produced and indexed

• Understanding the cultures of information production and exchange

• Using the right search, indexing & social media tools for your project

For your assignments:

• How does web search impact on political, economical and social hierarchies?

• What types of activities occur on the ‘dark net’ and what are implications of these activities?

• What are the implications of the ‘filter bubble’?