     Rank Utopia: Google , Hegemony and Access to InformationIntroduction The right to access diverse and accurate information lies in the foundation of a healthy society; an informed citizen is a good citizen with an ability to perform his role as part of the democratic structure. Many factors, most of which are beyond the scope of this essay, impinge on the way information is published and gathered in our ‘information society'; access to technology and the Digital Divide , media ownership, and state and international regulation have a fundamental, and often detrimental, effect on the quality and quantity of information available for public access. The World Wide Web is more often that not regarded as an innovation with radical implications on society (Holmes 1998); in the past 10 years, countless books and articles have been written about this medium's ‘boundary bashing potential' (Poster 2001 p.173). The emergence of the internet brought new hope and was hailed by many as a truly egalitarian medium that will offer an unprecedented amount of free information, and ‘build a society and an economy of greater opportunity, greater freedom, and harmony.'(Feldman 2004) The World Wide Web is quickly becoming the major source of information for citizens in western democracies, and more slowly in other developing countries. ‘Services that help users find their way to content of interest are crucial to the Web's ability to be a useful tool for people', and so ‘As the amount of Web content skyrocketed, search engines became increasingly important in sifting through online material.'(Hargittai 2004) As professor Julie Cohen from Georgetown University points out, the growing use of information technologies ‘enables vendors of digital content to exert tighter control over access to and use of that content'(Cohen 2001). This also increases ‘control over inputs to creation and communication — and thus over social “meaning-making processes”' (Ibid.) Safa Rashtchy, a senior research analyst at the American Investment Bank, USBPJ, predicts that the online search market, with current revenues of almost US $2 Billion per year, will reach $7 Billion by 2007, a growth rate of 35% per annum. (Rashtchy 2003) Unlike other traditional and new media, search engines are often regarded as agenda-free tools that can be used to find almost everything. On the surface this assumption is not un-true; search engines apparently have no editors and, at least some of them, are still owned by fairly new companies that are not related to old and established media moguls or governments. This essay aims to put under scrutiny the current leader of the growing search engine industry- Google , and examine the possible influence it has on the way information is accessed in our day and age. This also questions the World Wide Web's ability, with Google as its primary gatekeeper, to be a revolutionary, free and egalitarian source of information. Genesis The story of Google begins in the meeting between two Stanford University Computer Science Doctoral Candidates in 1995. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in their early 20's, started working on a new search engine called Backrub . The odd name was derived from the engine's unique ability ‘to analyse the "back links" pointing to a given website' ( Google History 2004). I will elaborate more on this unique technology, and some of its disquieting implications, later in the essay. By 1998, Brin and Page establish their own company, Google Inc ., with the support and encouragement of Yahoo! Co-founder (and future Google rival), David Filo. Backrub received a new name, Google ; derived from the mathematical term Googol (1 followed by a 100 zeros) as a symbol of the engine's ability to sift through immense amounts of information ( Google Info). Google was a late entrant to the search engine market (Hargittai 2004), and in 1998 processed only 10,000 search queries per day. A year later, in 1999, Google was providing answers to more than 3 million searches every day. ( Google Timeline 2004) By 2003, Google facilitated more than 250 Million daily search queries (Sullivan 2003). This may look like a healthy distribution but in actual fact, more than 49% of all internet searches are performed by Google (Ibid). This includes queries submitted to the main Google web site ( Google .com) and to partner sites that outsource Google 's technology ( Go.com , AOL.com ). Yahoo.com , the world's second most popular search destination, also used Google 's technology before launching its own earlier this year ( search.yahoo.com ). Google 's control on the search market, and thus on the access to information, is comparable to that of Microsoft (Dror 2004). In a world in which the public has a growing awareness of media ownership and diversity issues, Google managed to establish itself as an trusted medium using a simple, non-imposing design, a happy-go-lucky corporate philosophy that includes sayings like ‘do no evil', and a vision to ‘make the world's information universally accessible and useful'.(Company Overview) Googling Google's ease of use and capacity to handle non-English queries made it popular among Chinese internet users. (BBC 2002) The Chinese government, to say the least, did not appreciate the fact that Chinese citizens could now access personal information about their leaders and use the web for quasi-revolutionary activities. The Google -Chinese ordeal resulted with the Chinese government blocking access to the popular search engine, and at times even redirecting traffic to other, government endorsed, search engines; users that typed www.google.com in the address bar were greeted by the search engine of the Beijing University or one of a few other Chinese language engines.(Zittrain & Edelman 2002, Crampton 2002) But it was not long before the Chinese government would learn the advantage of joining the Dot Com(munist) revolution. And so, following an undisclosed agreement with the local government, Google was accessible again to internet users in mainland China . Search results for certain ‘problematic' terms were taken out of the index. The variety of information accessible through Google also varied according to the specific area within China ; similar search strings lead to different results in rural and urban areas. In addition, searching for vexed topics (like the Chinese Prime Minister Jiang Zemin) resulted in an immediate loss of internet connection (!) even to always-on broadband users. (Zittrain & Edelman 2002) Harvard University Legal researchers, Edelman and Zittrainl, have also found more than a 100 websites, most of which contain Nazi and racist propaganda, that were excluded from local versions of Google in Germany and Disturbing as they are, cases of web sites being actively excluded from the Google index are rare, and can be seen as understandable, and at times desirable, measures of an organization that manages gargantuan amounts of information. The problem lies in the lack of a public procedure to facilitate such exclusions in accord with local and international legal procedures and standards. PageRank Google 's popularity is derived from its relative ability to distinguish relevant sources out of millions of available web pages. The reliability and accuracy of online sources is determined using a unique back-linking technology called PageRank. As Brin and Page explain in their seminal Anatomy of a Large Scale Hypertextual Search Engine , PageRank is determined using an algorithm that incorporates several factors. The specific factors and their relative weight are not published but generally include the amount of pages linked to the specific page. Google takes into account the PageRank and credibility of the referring (linking) websites (Langville & Meyer 2004) - a link from a popular and respected website like Microsoft .com is worth more than a link from a personal or small business web site (Bury 2003) - and the internal linking scheme within the web site itself (Kamvar et al 2004). ‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query'. ( Google Technology) Google tells us that a website's PageRank is determined through a democratic procedure. The problem is that while in a democracy all votes are equal, in Google 's democracy some votes equal more than others. This means that well established websites are more likely to receive rising amount of traffic. In addition, many online businesses invest in literally buying links from other web sites, and thus increase their PageRank and virtually guarantee themselves a prominent placement and valuable traffic (Bury 2003). The last few years saw the nativity of a whole new industry; Search Engine Marketing Professionals, and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) “Gurus” are often payed thousands of Dollars in order to generate search engine-based traffic to commercial websites. In a book titled Search Engine Visibility , Shari Thurow, a prominent figure in this new field, tells us that in our day and age ‘just building a web site is not guarantee of receiving visitors' (Thurow 2003 p.5). The way to guarantee visitors more often requires an investment in a search engine-friendly web design; keyword oriented copy writing, and paid placements in indexes or link exchange schemes. AdWords A possible use of AdWords was exemplified earlier this year (2004), following the sudden death of British scientist Dr David Kelly. ‘The chain of events that led to Dr Kelly's apparent suicide began with... (a) report on the radio…alleging that the (British)government had "sexed up" an intelligence dossier on Iraq '. The BBC was the one to expose Dr Kelly as the source of this information, and thus played a problematic role in leading to his premature death, natural or not. The BBC was also criticized for unethical exposure of journalistic sources, an exposure that in itself poses a threat to proper democratic function of the fourth estate. (Gibson 2004) 48 Hours before the Lord Hutton, appointed to investigate the controversial death, published his report on this matter, BBC has begun what it called an “advertising experiment”, ‘buying up all internet search terms relating to the inquiry' (Gibson 2004, Kiss 2004). This way, anyone searching for “Hutton Inquiry” or “Hutton Report” on Google , the UK 's most popular search engine, was greeted with a prominent link to the BBC's online coverage of the investigation, a coverage that would otherwise contain fierce criticism of the BBC as an interested party in the ordeal. (Ibid, Ibid) Privacy As Professor Julie Cohen points out: ‘ access to “proprietary” content increasingly require individuals to surrender significant amounts of personal information — information which in turn becomes the proprietary content of the entity that collected it, and which is used to create reductive profiles that channel standardized information back to individuals.'(Cohen 2001) Google is not only a search engine. It also provides date-matching, news gathering, shopping, and stock quotes information. During the next few months the public will be invited to use Google 's new web-based email service. Google today is an organization that administers information about our hobbies, interests, shopping habits, opinions, contact details, and in some cases, even our sexual preferences. IPO Conclusion: It's an Ad World After All At the end of the day, like any other medium, Google and other search engines are prone to yield to government and financial pressures. That is in addition to PageRank 's inherent hegemonic functions that help strengthening those which are already strong. It is also important to note that the growing ability of the public to gather information is not necessarily constructive. Using search engines and news services to access personalised information, the public's perspective may become more limited than ever. Communities may feel more informed, but in actual fact get more of the same instead of the diverse perspective that is available from (some) edited media. (Moisy 1997) While the general public is “Feeling Lucky” to have such a vital information gathering tool, It is important to keep the public informed of censorship and privacy issues; the searching crowd should be reminded that, to quote Nietzsche, ‘When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you'. ¨ This information is cited in this format as requested by Nilesen//Netratings and is available at: http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/news.jsp?section=dat_to&country=au |
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