Machill on search engines
Prof. Dr. Marcel Machill, MPA (Germans sure give out titles) visited us at the department yesterday, and gave an interesting talk titled Search Engines as Gatekeepers: Democratic Challenges.
Marcel Machill
Machill has conducted a major study of search engines in Germany, which concluded that Google isn't always the best, and that 50% of the results generally are uninteresting.
What is more important is that people tend to use only one search engine, and perceive it as neutral. The reality is that the results are full of spam -- often porn and hate sites -- and often skewed by commercial or other interests. He listed many techniques professional search optimizers use to attract search hits, often hits from people searching for very different things.
When a search for "Brithney Spears" or "Britney Spers" only yields porn, we might be concerned about our kids, he said.
One very telling example was from a usability test with a user. Because he had made a spelling error, the search engine found nothing, but an ad for eBay claimed they had lots of results for the search. Because of the typography on the page, the user overlooked the "zero results" message, and saw only the eBay ad. When was the last time you thought of typography as a democratic problem?
Machill wants the search engines to cooperate to form rules of conduct that are agreed upon, just as media institutions have in many countries. If they cooperate, the engines could also fight search spam better.
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