The egalitarian effect of search engines Export

@misc{citeulike:409953, abstract = {Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web.}, archivePrefix = {arXiv}, author = {Fortunato, Santo and Flammini, Alessandro and Menczer, Filippo and Vespignani, Alessandro}, citeulike-article-id = {409953}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CY/0511005}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs.CY/0511005}, day = {1}, eprint = {cs.CY/0511005}, keywords = {buscadores, enlaces, google, law, power}, month = {Nov}, posted-at = {2005-11-28 09:57:34}, priority = {2}, title = {The egalitarian effect of search engines}, url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CY/0511005}, year = {2005} }

TY - ELEC ID - citeulike:409953 L3 - citeulike-article-id:409953 N2 - Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web. TI - The egalitarian effect of search engines KW - buscadores KW - enlaces KW - google KW - law KW - power AU - Fortunato, Santo AU - Flammini, Alessandro AU - Menczer, Filippo AU - Vespignani, Alessandro PY - 2005/Nov/01/ UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CY/0511005 ER -