Transcript Browser Wars and the Politics of Search

Browser Wars and the
Politics of Search Engines
Most People Access the Web Through Web
Browsers…
 Which Browser do you use? What do you like about
it?
 Does it really matter which Browser you use?
 What were the “Browser Wars”?
Browser Wars
 There were once two widely used web
“browsers,” both owned by giant
conglomerates: Internet Explorer (owned
by Microsoft) and Netscape (owned by
AOL-Time-Warner). Then in 1998 IE
overtook Netscape in popularity. In the
year 2000, 92% of web users use IE. But
Firefox is gaining ground.
Why do Browsers Matter?
 Because they can “bias” our experience of
the Internet.
Internet Explorer acts as a particularly
strict gatekeeper
 IE is bundled with Windows, the most popular
operating system in the world
 To get updates to Windows and Microsoft Office, you
used to have to use IE. The same was true of lots of
Windows based software.
 IE has all sorts of features designed to promote
Microsoft products. For instance, it sets msn.com–
Microsoft’s site– as the default home page.
 Websites designed for IE (often using Microsoft’s
FrontPage) typically don’t work as well on other
browsers so many webdesigners design only for IE.
In addition to Browsers, most people
use Search Engines to surf the web.
 Which search engines do you use?
 How many times a day do you “google” ?
 How do you use them? What sorts of things
do you search for?
How do search engines work?
Take as
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an example:
1. Sends out a robot or “spider” to all known URLs, scans
(some of) their content and indexes them.
2. Follows the links at the scanned site to find other URLs.
3. Ranks all the pages it has indexed.
Google bases its page rankings on “linkage”: the number
and ranking of pages that link to a particular site determines
its rank. It values links from highly ranked sites more than
links from lesser sites.
Most search engines use spiders to scan the web for
content to index and sometimes combine this with human
indexers who search out and catalogue interesting
pages.
Some search engines, like Ask.com, require sites to
pay to move up in rank.
Most search engines are “advertising
supported”
 Google runs its ads in a right hand column
and at the top of the page. Clients pay
everytime someone clicks on one of their ads.
So does Bing.
 Other engines (Altavista; Ask) allow clients to
pay to move up the ranks.
 Amazon.com has an arrangement with
Yahoo!: every time someone enters a search
with the word “book” in the string, Amazon will
come up somewhere in the first page of
results.
How are the search results returned by
,
and
different?
Most popular search engines (circa
2006).
And Google’s share of the search
market has risen since then…
 As of 2008, Google had extended its share to over
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60% of the search market.
--As of April 7, 2008, 67% of queries performed used
Google, 20% Yahoo, 5.25% MSN and 4% Ask.
In the US, Google is the most visited site on the
Internet. (And it is even more frequently visited by
people at work).
Google’s Keyword ads are the most popular and
profitable form of advertising on the web.
There are even games based on the search engine.
Google is become the gateway to the Internet for
most Americans
What do people uses search engines
for?
 Google Zeitgeist
 Hitwise Data Center
Problems with Search Engines
 They don’t index everything. Google claims to have
indexed 8.2 billion webpages by August 2005. (Out of
an estimated 40 billion pages on the web at that
time). All together all the search engines & portals
are estimated to have indexed only 40%of the web as
of 2005 and that proportion is shrinking every year.
 They lead us to the most mainstream content.
 Search engines raise serious privacy concerns. (For
instance, Yahoo, Msn and Ask all handed over the
search records of its users to US government in
2006; Google refused)
The Problem with Google
 Google has been criticized on a number of
counts:
-- Some have criticized the search giant for
caving into political pressure to exclude
certain sites from the results pages returned
for certain countries (China, Singapore)
-- Others have criticized Google for NOT
censoring an anti-semitic website that was
returned as a top result for a search of the
word “jew”
Problems with Google continued
 Google has been called “ethnocentric”
because the majority of the pages it indexes
are in English and hosted in the US or UK.
--Alternatives are being developed: Quaero
(France); Baidu (China)
Recent Developments:
 Google decides to end censorship on
Google.cn