MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search
-
Upload
jonathon-hutchinson -
Category
Education
-
view
100 -
download
4
description
Transcript of MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search
![Page 2: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/2.jpg)
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:
![Page 3: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/3.jpg)
Online Media week 6
Avoiding the Googlization of everything
![Page 4: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/4.jpg)
Pew Internet Research Findings
![Page 5: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/5.jpg)
![Page 6: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/6.jpg)
![Page 7: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/7.jpg)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_X6EyqXa2s
![Page 8: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/8.jpg)
Highest ranking search engines .au
Hitwise, US 2014
![Page 9: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/9.jpg)
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
![Page 10: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/10.jpg)
Google Juice
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BNHR6IQJGZs
![Page 11: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/11.jpg)
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?
![Page 12: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/12.jpg)
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.
![Page 13: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/13.jpg)
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
![Page 14: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/14.jpg)
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.
![Page 15: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/15.jpg)
![Page 16: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/16.jpg)
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
![Page 17: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/17.jpg)
![Page 18: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/18.jpg)
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).
![Page 19: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/19.jpg)
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’
![Page 20: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/20.jpg)
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
![Page 21: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/21.jpg)
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)
![Page 22: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/22.jpg)
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
![Page 23: MECO3602 2014, Week 4 Lecture 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search](https://reader035.fdocuments.us/reader035/viewer/2022062418/5564cdd6d8b42a565b8b532a/html5/thumbnails/23.jpg)
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’?