The Importance of Shopping Around
In preparing a lesson on internet research last week, I was reminded of just how important it is to try your searches in multiple search engines instead of just relying on one favorite. I was looking for a current topic to explore with the ninth graders with whom I would be working and decided to give the recent protests in Tibet a try. It was fascinating – and very scary – to see the differences between the list of sites returned by Google and Yahoo when I entered the search term “lhasa riot” (Lhasa is the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region). Google’s results included a number of YouTube videos (who owns YouTube again?) and links to reports of the events on a number of western news outlets. The Yahoo results, in contrast, featured links to ChinaDaily and People’s Daily Online, both Chinese sites sponsored and controlled by the Chinese government.
A mistake? An anomaly in Yahoo’s search algorithm? Maybe not, considering Yahoo’s documented cooperation with the Chinese government in its efforts to censor search results to eliminate anti-Chinese content. Are students aware that these things are happening? Are they aware of the immense power that these search companies wield as gatekeepers to the internet? How many of our students – how many of us – actually bother to perform a search in two search engines instead of just relying on that first page of results from whichever one happens to be our favorite? We’ll drive across town from Best Buy to Circuit City to make sure we get the best TV at the best price but most of us (myself included) never take the time to shop around our important questions about what’s happening in our world. Perhaps we should…
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