POLITICS IN SEARCH ENGINES ??– INTERPRETIVE NATURE OF AN INTERNET ARTEFACT

INTRODUCTION:

                    Web search is critical to our ability to use the Internet. Whoever controls search engines has enormous influence on us all. They can shape what we read, who we listen to, and who gets heard perhaps, controls the Internet itself. Today, no one comes closer to controlling search than Google does. In this post, I’ll describe a few of the ways that individuals, companies, and even governments have tried to shape Google’s results to serve their goals.


INEFFECTIVE LINKED SEARCH & GOOGLEBOMBING:

                    In 2001, a college student named Adam Mathes noticed something interesting about Google, almost accidentally. He found out that the genius of Google is that its creators didn’t come up with a great organizational scheme for the web. Instead, they got everyone else to do it for them. The heart of Google’s system—called PageRank—is that it looks at who links to whom online. Every time you create a link to another web page, you’re in effect telling the world that the web page has on it something important, or interesting, or useful, or funny, or whatever matters to you & each such link is a kind of vote. Very loosely put, Google goes around the web, counting links & hence pages with more links pointing at them have been “voted up” more often,  must be more important, and therefore Google displays them higher in its results. Whats more - they are marked as presumably trusted and influential, counting its own outbound links as being ‘worth’ more!!
                   Moreover, Google used links not just to learn how important a page was, but also what it was about i.e., the more pages that link using a given phrase, the more Google will think that the phrase accurately describes the page. But that would mean that Google could be tricked; all you would have to do is get a lot of friends to create links using particular words. Such a trick was referred to as Googlebombing.
                    It started as a joke, but Googlebombing has been used to send some serious messages. So many people use search engines, and their results appear to be so sophisticated, that any message you can sneak through in the form of a Googlebomb has at least a veneer of legitimacy. Thus, the most famous Googlebomb of all time is probably the one many Democrats launched in 2003 to link to George W. Bush’s official biography page with the phrase “miserable failure.” This is a significant new form of politicking. Land a bomb like this and you can convince the world that Google agrees with your position. A successful Googlebomb doesn’t just reflect the consensus of web users; it can help construct that consensus.

INTERPRETIVE  EXAMPLES :
1) SEARCH: “JEW”
                    Consider a more serious example: In 2004, the No.1 Google hit for a search on “ jew” was jewwatch.com, which describes itself as “An Oasis of News for Americans Who Presently Endure the Hateful Censorship of Zionist Occupation” and features a wide assortment of paranoid anti-Semitic content. Upset at this placement, a Jewish activist asked people around the web to link the word “ jew” instead to a Wikipedia article. This touched off acounter-Googlebomb as some neo-Nazi sites tried to point the term back to Jew Watch, but ultimately attempts to make “ jew” point to the comparatively neutral Wikipedia page was successful. There’d been Googlebombs before and there’d be Googlebombs after, but this one did something that no other had: it drew a response from Google. At the top of the Google results page for “ jew” is a box reading, “Offensive Search Results. We’re disturbed about these results as well.”
                     The same campaign that produced the Jew Googlebomb also included a petition to have Google remove Jew Watch entirely, so that no Google search—and certainly not on the term “ jew”—would ever return it. The activists certainly had a point. Google could easily have changed their software so no trace of Jew Watch remained in its results pages, no indication that anything other than the usual process of looking for relevant results had ever taken place. But that’s not what Google did. Instead, it left the results alone—that is, left it up to the back-and-forth push-pull struggle of the Googlebombs and counter-bombs; may he who gets the most links win. Google was insistent that it wouldn’t intervene in the results. The reason is a feature of the company’s corporate culture that goes even deeper than its “Don’t be evil” motto. It deeply believes in throwing huge automated processes at a problem & just feeds the Internet into its server farm and waits for a result to emerge, unsullied by mere mortals. Thus, the “Offensive Search Results” page that Google put up to explain why “ jew” takes you to Jew Watch is Google’s way of saying “don’t blame us, the computers did it.”
                      Is that really true? Is it really the case that search engine results are purely automated, impersonal things that don’t reflect anyone’s opinion at all? Who, after all, gave the computer its instructions?
                       The programmer did. A computer is just a glorified abacus; it does what you tell it to. Google’s programmers may not have specifically told its computers to rank Jew Watch highly and to call George Bush a miserable failure. But they did feed into the computers a list of criteria—each link from a weblog is worth so many points, pages less than a week old get a 10% newness bonus, whatever—and those criteria lead directly to these conclusions.  Even the employers of Google would prefer return results that the users believe to be useful. They optimize their algorithms all the time to make the results more relevant to their users’ questions. They don’t want you to get Jew Watch if you search for say “Hitler.” This isn’t to say that what Google is doing is right or wrong, just that the distinction it makes between objective “automatic” results from the computer and subjective “beliefs and preferences” doesn’t really hold up.  Call this problem the Google Dilemma. Google has the ability to shape its search results to prefer some web sites over others. Indeed, whatever choice it makes—alphabetical, by link count, by politics, by whatever—will result in some sites being on the first page of results and others not.

2) SEARCH: “SEARCH KING”

                         Google isn’t the only one facing the Google Dilemma. Lawyers, judges, and legislators deal with it, too. There have been dozens of lawsuits against search engines. Each of those lawsuits requires the court hearing it to confront the Dilemma.  Consider a famous example in search engine lawsuit of all time. An Oklahoma web company called Search King had a web site that was highly ranked for certain queries on Google. It had “PageRank 8”: on Google’s 0–10 scale of how important a page is, Search King was an 8, which means many people were used to it.
                          Then, one day in late summer of 2002, Google utterly destroyed Search King’s Business overnight & kind of drop from 8 to PageRank 4 is a disaster. Suddenly, instead of showing up high on the first page of Google results, Search King and its clients were lucky to show up in the first few pages. For a local business dependent on Internet orders, that’s the kiss of death. Businesses had gone up and down in Google’s rankings before, but Search King made history by being the first to sue Google over it. Search King claimed, in essence, that Google was libeling it. Demoting Search King to PageRank 4 was the equivalent of telling Google’s users that Search King was unimportant or a bad source of information.  One might expect that Google’s reply when confronted about “search king” would be the same reply it gave when confronted about “ jew”: “Don’t blame us, the computers did it.” Instead, Google gave an intriguingly different answer. Buried beneath the legalese, Google said something more like, “We’re not admitting to anything, but if by some chance we were to have hand-tweaked the results a bit to punish Search King, then we would have had a good reason to.”
                          Consider the possibility that Search King wasn’t quite the innocent Internet entrepreneur it made itself out to be & Search King was in fact running a large and cynical version of a Googlebomb called a “link farm”(which was the case!). A link farm operator has decided that getting thousands of people to link to her to raise her PageRank is just too much work. Instead, she created those links herself. They’re designed to look enough like real web content to trick a search engine, but consist mostly of links to other pages in the link farm itself. It’s a web form of spam. If she creates enough fake links to look as though tons of people have suddenly decided this, then her previously-obscure site is now the world’s foremost authority. For this, Search King’s link farm had its clients link to each other.  Google’s guidelines for website creators specifically prohibit link farming and link exchanges of the sort Search King was engaging in, and when Google realizes someone’s been running a link farm, it retaliates and demotes the link farm in its rankings.
                           As it turned out, Google won the Search King lawsuit. The court held that Google’s choice of how to rank its results was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment for search engines on similar grounds. This seems like the right result; if search engines didn’t have a fairly free hand to demote sites in their rankings, the Internet would be completely overrun with junk from link farms. Still, the First Amendment reasoning is worrisome as it would suggest that the government is powerless to make the search engines stop, even in cases where the re-ranking was obviously malicious and dishonest. There are many  who’d disagree, but I hope at this point everyone would at least agree on one thing: Google has a choice to make, one that matters a lot.

CONCLUSION :
                           Search Engines being an internet artefact is interpretive, and hence can be interpreted in either way of possessing politics in their nature or not(as in the above examples) depending on the perspective of the interpreter. But finally, the power lies with the search engine companies to make the truth accessible. Its thoughts about “ jew” have changed over time, as has its opinion about “search king”
                           Search results matter: to culture, to business, and to society. Every decision about search, and every lawsuit about search, has these inescapably political questions at its heart. That is Google’s dilemma, and ours.

By
Syed Ashruf
AE09B025