more on More Is Not Necessarily Better

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: eszter.hargittai.082204 () webuse org
Date: August 23, 2004 11:26:54 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] more on More Is Not Necessarily Better

Hi, for IP perhaps,

A few things regarding the article and the response.

1. Making it sound as though 95% of all searches are being done on the
same two search engines is misleading. Portals powered by Google's
technology don't all show the results the same way as I've shown this
before here:
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_3/hargittai/index.html .
It makes a difference whether someone is at google.com or myway.com.  
And
so the market share of each site is lower than the authors claim.

2. Not enough data are collected on this point for me to back this up 
with
figures, but I would argue - having studied users' information-seeking
behavior and Web use sophistication for years - that it's not that easy
for people to switch to another search engine because they do not
necessarily know about viable alternatives.  I realize this sounds
shocking, but believe it or not - I do have data on this - some Internet
users don't even know what a search engine is and nor do they ever use
one.

3. The same search engine acts as a different resource depending on the
user.  My research shows that skilled users are less influenced by the
particular search engines and portals they use than lesser skilled 
users.
For example, when looking for a certain type of political information
(based on the online actions of 100 randomly selected Internet users
observed in person), those who knew to use multiple terms in their 
search
query were statistically significantly more likely to find the 
information
than those who did not know to do this REGARDLESS of whether users were
searching on Google or not.  What this implies is that some users may 
not
be that influenced by search engines' decisions about what content to
feature and how - because they have the skills to sidestep them - 
whereas
lesser-skilled users may be more biased by what information search 
engines
and portals present to them.

Since skill seems to be related to some traditional predictors of 
Internet
use (e.g. level of education), this is what I've called the 
"second-level
digital divide". Despite being connected, some people are able to 
benefit
from the Web less than others and are more likely to be influenced by
search engines' and portals' decisions about what content to feature
prominently.

(The empirical evidence I refer to is available in my dissertation "How
Wide a Web? Inequalities in Accessing Information Online" Princeton
University 2003.)

These are just some more thoughts to consider on these issues.

Eszter

Eszter Hargittai
Northwestern University
http://www.eszter.com

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 22:34:36 -0400, David Farber <dave () farber net> 
wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Gerry Faulhaber <gerry-faulhaber () mchsi com>
> Date: August 23, 2004 5:18:44 PM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Re: [IP] More Is Not Necessarily Better
>
> Dave [for IP, if you wish]--
>
> The only "pause for thought" this note gives me is: how could such a
> silly
> thing be published in NYT?  Of course the world is awash in 
> information;
> trillions of bits per second is generated, almost all of which is
> totally
> uninteresting.  Who cares if my grandmother just clipped her toenails?
> Information, yes; interesting, no.  We have always paid dearly for
> someone
> else to assimilate the firehose of experiential information and reduce
> to
> what we are interested in: we call them "editors."  NYT itself is based
> on
> culling the good stuff from the junk and presenting it to us, and we
> value
> them for it.  All newspapers, magazines, and indeed IP does exactly the
> same
> thing, and we value them for it.  Are they "choosing what we see"?  Of
> course they are!  That's their job.  If they didn't do it well, then
> competitors would unseat them.
>
> Now search engines perform much the same function.  They want to
> present us
> with the information we really want, not *all* the information.  Google
> became popular (you will recall) precisely because its results were 
> much
> more relevant to us than the random results (perhaps even the paid
> results)
> of Alta Vista, et al.  What's the best predictor of what I am
> interested in?
> Why, what everyone else is interested in.  Call us sheep or lemmings,
> but
> this is how it works.  Faulting Google for giving us what we want,
> claiming
> they have some insidious hold over us, is just silly.  If they weren't
> giving us what we wanted, then Yahoo, MS, or any of a number of
> competitors
> would eat their lunch.  So far, I haven't seen that happen.  If and
> when it
> does, then I'll believe Google got it wrong.  But until that day,
> claiming
> their power is "disquieting" is just silly.
>
> Professor Gerald R. Faulhaber
> Business and Public Policy Dept.
> Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
> Philadelphia, PA 19104
> currently on leave
> Penn Law School, University of Pennsylvania
> Philadelphia, PA 19104
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Farber" <dave () farber net>
> To: "Ip" <ip () v2 listbox com>
> Sent: Monday, August 23, 2004 11:24 AM
> Subject: [IP] More Is Not Necessarily Better
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Bob Rosenberg <bob () bobrosenberg phoenix az us>
> Date: August 23, 2004 11:07:43 AM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: NYTimes: More Is Not Necessarily Better
>
> Dave
>
> For IP.
>
> Here's an interesting perspective on internet search engines.  It gives
> one pause for thought.
>
> Bob
>
> ***************
>
> OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
> More Is Not Necessarily Better
> By MATTHEW HINDMAN and KENNETH NEIL CUKIER
> Google's influence on what users can see and do online reinforces a
> worrisome trend on the Web.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/opinion/23hindman.html?th
>
> --
>
> Bob Rosenberg
>
> "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular."
>      --Adlai Stevenson
>
> "You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a
> reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating
> the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for
> independence."
>                                — C.A. Beard
>
> *****************
>
> More Is Not Necessarily Better
> By MATTHEW HINDMAN and KENNETH NEIL CUKIER
>
> Published: August 23, 2004
>
> Imagine if one company controlled the card catalog of every library in
> the world. The influence it would have over what people see, read and
> discuss would be enormous. Now consider online search engines.
>
> Few people realize that 95 percent of all Web searches in the United
> States are handled by two companies, Google and Yahoo, either directly
> or through other sites that use their technology. In the case of 
> Google,
> whose shares started to trade publicly last week, the company holds the
> world's largest index of Web content, at more than four billion pages,
> and handles more than 200 million searches a day. The influence of
> search companies in determining what users worldwide can see and do
> online is breathtaking.
>
> As disquieting as this power may be, it masks a deeper problem. While
> search engines are indispensable for finding information online, the
> technology on which they are based serves to narrow the field of sites
> that people see. In this respect, Google's technology reinforces a
> worrisome feature of the Web: the trend toward consolidation that
> affects everything from politics to news to commerce.
>
> Google's use of links to find content essentially turns the Web into 
> the
> world's biggest popularity contest - and just as in high school, this
> can have negative consequences. Google's great innovation in online
> searching, and the main reason it is so successful, is that its
> technology analyzes links among Web pages, not just the content within
> them. Behind Google's complex ranking system is a simple idea: each 
> link
> to a page should be considered a vote, and the pages with the most 
> votes
> should be ranked first. This elegant approach uses the distributed
> intelligence of Web users to determine which content is most relevant.
>
> But what is good for Google is not necessarily good for the rest of the
> Web. The company's technology is so strong that its competitors have
> adopted a similar approach to organizing online information, which 
> means
> they now return similar search results. Thus popular sites become ever
> more popular, while obscure sites recede ever further into the ether.
>
> This winner-take-all system is not unique to the Web, but technology
> seems to encourage it. That would explain the predominance of one or 
> two
> sites in almost every category of online information, be it eBay for
> auctions or Amazon for books. When people are given lots of choices,
> they tend to concentrate their attention on only a few. (Studies show,
> for example, that the majority of users don't click past the first page
> or two of results when looking for information online.)
>
> Google's business model is based on tapping into the collective
> intelligence of Internet users, so it was hardly surprising that it
> would rely on the same approach when it went public. It used an auction
> to determine its share price, bypassing Wall Street investment banks in
> favor of prospective investors who were allowed to make their bids
> online. An argument persists over whether this method was a financial
> success - the day before it began trading, Google was forced to reduce
> both the number of shares it offered and their price - but it was
> undeniably a popular triumph: because of the auction, many more people
> had the opportunity to buy shares at the initial offer price than if 
> the
> company had gone public the traditional way.
>
> As Google begins its life as a public company, the question is not
> merely how valuable it will be - it is how powerful it will be.
> Investors will watch to see whether Google can preserve its dominant
> position. For the public, however, of greater concern is how it uses 
> its
> influence over information and, more broadly, what happens when we 
> place
> so much control in the hands of companies like Google.
>
> The $27 billion question - a figure based on the six-year-old company's
> market valuation after its first day of trading - may be whether 
> another
> innovation comes along that challenges both Google's market dominance
> and its methodology. Companies are already trying to "personalize"
> searches, for example, taking into account who and where a user is. So 
> a
> search for "French press" will return results about journalism, dry
> cleaners or coffee, depending on the user's interests.
>
> None of this would be very important if the Web weren't so vital. Some
> of the credit for the Web's vitality, of course, goes to Google itself.
> And after last week, thousands of investors have a financial interest 
> in
> Google. Yet when we consider what the company means for the future of
> the Web, we all have a stake.
>
> Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Cukier are fellows at the National
> Center for Digital Government at the Kennedy School at Harvard.

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