Post on 08-May-2015
description
“To existexist is to be indexed by search engines”.
(Introna & Nissenbaum, 2000)
Why search engines matter
Search engines (SE) became gatekeepers of our information.
Complexity and invisibility of SE technology.
Social consequences of SE technology adoption.
Who opens boxes of search technology?
Mostly marketers deal with “black boxes” of SE technology
Researchers put primary attention to technological and business aspects
Social sciences pay little attention to social consequences of broad usage of SE
Directories: applying library technologies to Web
Early Web was hand-made.
People manually structured best sites intro directories.
Yahoo was the most successful project of this kind.
With the time it became impossible to find and classify all existing sites.
Magic of robots The time of software
robots came. In 1993 first real search
engine appeared
Three equally important parts of search engine technology. Crawlers (robots, bots)
collect information Database of WebPages
(index) Query processor with
ranking algorithm and interface
Sinking in spam First SE dealt primarily
with pages metadata Soon search was polluted
by spammers (“optimizers”) Users browsed pages and
pages of search results looking for necessary information
Liberation mission of Google: its link algorithm solved many of spam problems
Drawbacks of SE technology
Increasing scale of SE economy In 2005 Google had more
than 175.000 servers, in 2009 - more than 1.000.000
Prospering SEO industry (link farms, googlebombing, etc) advancing your sites for money
Growth of invisible web
How to search invisible Web? Quickly growing number of
dark, deep, hidden or invisible web pages and sites They cannot be indexed
and found by main search engines
Invisible Web is heterogeneous: Corporate Intranet Proprietary sites Pages closed by owners for
crawlers Dynamic content in the
databases (typical for social media)
Social search: bots and people reunion
The more “networking” becomes the world - the more difficult to find relevant information using traditional SE technology
Ways out Develop more and more sophisticated
search Use different social search engines,
directories and direct “crowdsourcing”
More and more social media built their search on peoples’ recommendations and preferences
Three case studies: Twitter, Facebook and Ning
In 2008 Twitter, Facebook and Ning were among the fastest growing social sites
Twitter was the champion, Facebook won competition with MySpace, Ning reached the number of 1 million networks
Common and different in social media search
Do all social media suggest social search opportunities for finding information?
Twitter: real-time search
Twitter search tools
Searching for existing accounts (“Find people” page)
Twitter search engine (search.twitter.com) Purchasing of
Summise search engine (July 2008)
Integrating search into personal accounts (April 2009)
Is it new generation of search?
One hour delay for search results vs. instant search: does it matter? Google searches past Twitter gives possibility
of real-time search. In many cases they
supplement each other
Business foundation for instant search
Twitter is talking about different businesses in real time. As a result: People immediately
receive information about different brands
Businesses lost control over news about their brands
Today businesses are seeking for people’s feedback
Twitter search races
Several twitter search engines were launched recently Twazzup was launched in
April 2009 Twellow – directory
about users Cloud.li – cloud-based
Twitter search engine Tweetmatic – video
search for Twitter Twitterfall – real time
observation of search results
Third party search tools
Hashtags
Hashtags are people’s tool for tagging information on Twitter Hashtags.org and
Twemes.com provides real-time tracking of Twitter hashtags.
Twitterfall Gives an opportunity to
follow theme in Twitter in real time
Third party search tools
Twellow
Twitmatic video search Previously
Twitmatic was for seeing videos shared on Twitter
Recently the site became a platform for video search
Third party search toolsTwazzup
http://www.twazzup.com
Great for seeing links about a given topic.
Mix of real time search and top tweets.
In conclusion: Twitter search is developing and it’s impossible to predict its future architecture
Facebook vs. Google More and more Google
treats Facebook as its major rival in the search engine market.
Facebook search is social
It is based more on recommendations of the friends than random links
Google acknowledged plans of offering personalized, social-networking style to its search results
Facebook search system
Facebook search is numerous and sophisticated First level search box is
on right upper side of the home page
It is just for starting search on Facebook
Most of advanced opportunities are connected with friends search and groups search
Searching friends“You’re not real
friends unless you’re Facebook friends??”
Finding friends system is the most valuable part of Facebook search
Search is built on the basis of chosen networks and information added by current users
Searching friends
Email Friend Finder searching tool helps to find friends by email addresses
AIM Friend Finder
These tolls allow users effectively use Facebook database stuff
Facebook browsing Browsing networks feature give also great
opportunities for search
Your network affiliation allows effectively browse your chosen networks
Interest groups search Searching
groups Interest groups is
an important Facebook feature
Facebook search engine allows users effectively search different groups
In conclusion: Facebook search system is built on peoples preferences and really challenges “more objective” Google search
Ning networks
More than one million networks
Small functionality of Ning search engine for networks Absence of ranking mechanism and
other tools for searching (search between results, etc)
Necessity of separate search inside networks
Separate networks are hardly searchable with Ning search tools
Ning search drawbacks
The problem of finding necessary network
Browsing?Using Ning
search engine?
Ning directory Hand-made
directory can help!
Directory for networks search
People’s cooperation can help finding necessary networks Only combination of
Ning search, Ning directory and Google or other SE search engines can give relevant result
How do social media change?
Social media sites are based on Web 2.0 technology It allows them combining
search engine technologies with individual users’ search behaviors
Facebook search reached the best (is case of scale) results in combining these features
In what way do people influence searching technology?
People like to follow their friends’ recommendations
This feature influencing many new “Google killers” start-up projects
In fact, very few of them became successful On March 2009 Wikia search
engine was closed by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
It reached only 10,000 unique users a month in comparison with Wikipedia having 30,000,000.
Social search and privacy issues
Everybody knows that you’re a dog
More and more private data are included in search
Privacy issues in integrating social search into search results
Underestimated social consequences
Search engine technologies generate new type of digital divide.
The border of second-level digital divide is between skilled users using search engines and unskilled (Halavais, A. 2009)
Majority of users choose “the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing” (Krug, S, 2006). Satisficing = satisfying
+sufficing
In conclusion
Search engine technology is huge and demands increasing number of servers, energy and money
Traditional search engines will preserve their significance
Page ranking will be more and more socially influenced
Instant search is challenging traditional search. Nevertheless, it cannot replace it and probably will coexist with traditional
Literature Brin, S, and Page, L, 1998 “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web
Search Engine”, delivered from http://infolab.stanford.edi/~backrub/google.html
Gori, M, Numerico, T. & Witter, I.H, 2007, “Web dragons: inside the myths of search engine technology”
Halavais, A. 2009, “Search engine society”
Introna, L.D. & Nissenbaum, H. 2000, “Shaping the web: why the politics of search engines matters,” The Information Society, 16, 3, pp. 169-85
Vossen, Gottfried, Hagemann Stephan (2007) “Unleashing Web 2.0. From concepts to creativity”, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
Kolbitsch, Josef, Maurer Hermann (2006), The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information We Consume.
Krug, S, (2006), “Don’t Make Me Think. A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability”, New Riders.