Multiple presents: how search engines rewrite the past Export

@article{citeulike:2965744, abstract = {Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting webpages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information on the internet for specific periods of time. However, these date stamps' are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added and the search engine's crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. This article examines the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of results and the structure of retrieved information erodes over time. 10.1177/1461444806069648}, author = {Hellsten, Iina and Leydesdorff, Loet and Wouters, Paul}, citeulike-article-id = {2965744}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444806069648}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/6/901}, doi = {10.1177/1461444806069648}, journal = {New Media Society}, keywords = {searchengines, time}, month = {December}, number = {6}, pages = {901--924}, posted-at = {2008-07-07 14:38:04}, priority = {2}, title = {Multiple presents: how search engines rewrite the past}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444806069648}, volume = {8}, year = {2006} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:2965744 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2965744 N2 - Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting webpages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information on the internet for specific periods of time. However, these date stamps' are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added and the search engine's crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. This article examines the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of results and the structure of retrieved information erodes over time. 10.1177/1461444806069648 IS - 6 JF - New Media Society EP - 924 TI - Multiple presents: how search engines rewrite the past VL - 8 SP - 901 KW - searchengines KW - time AU - Hellsten, Iina AU - Leydesdorff, Loet AU - Wouters, Paul PY - 2006/12/01/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444806069648 ER -