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New Scholarly Article on Topical Interests and Mitigation of Search Engine Bias

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Technology Review: Surprising Search Patterns – A new study questions the common assumption that search engines control the hierarchy of the Internet.

  • Topical interests and the mitigation of search engine bias, by S. Fortunato , A. Flammini, F. Menczer, and A. Vespignani, School of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47406; Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, D-33501 Bielefeld, Germany; Department of Computer Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405; and Complex Networks Lagrange Laboratory, Institute for Scientific Interchange, 10133 Torino, Italy: “Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the web despite its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page ranking strategies, and it has been argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. This bias could lead to a dangerous monopoly of information. We show that, contrary to intuition, empirical data do not support this conclusion; popular sites receive far less traffic than predicted. We discuss a model that accurately predicts traffic data patterns by taking into consideration the topical interests of users and their searching behavior in addition to the way search engines rank pages. The heterogeneity of user interests explains the observed mitigation of search engines’ popularity bias.”
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