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.
%0 Generic
%1 citeulike:409953
%A Fortunato, Santo
%A Flammini, Alessandro
%A Menczer, Filippo
%A Vespignani, Alessandro
%D 2005
%K buscadores, citeulike enlaces, google, law, power
%T The egalitarian effect of search engines
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CY/0511005
%X 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.
@electronic{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.}},
added-at = {2017-09-08T10:52:59.000+0200},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
author = {Fortunato, Santo and Flammini, Alessandro and Menczer, Filippo and Vespignani, Alessandro},
biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/21159bcd2df7df57ecb2079ed1b9f6bc6/fernand0},
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},
interhash = {c2250fe5b9a6ac4abb7723028a9d3b98},
intrahash = {1159bcd2df7df57ecb2079ed1b9f6bc6},
keywords = {buscadores, citeulike enlaces, google, law, power},
month = nov,
posted-at = {2005-11-28 09:57:34},
priority = {2},
timestamp = {2017-09-08T10:53:23.000+0200},
title = {{The egalitarian effect of search engines}},
url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.CY/0511005},
year = 2005
}