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…
3 Comments
Good point. I hadn’t thought of that. It’s too easy to assume that all search engines are the same. There’s always a bias of some sort. I was aware that most people don’t venture farther than the first page of hits and I talk to students about this all the time. I know that part of it is the result of “relevance” (or how often a certain word appears in a website) but is it also true that one can pay to have a site located at the top?
Barbara,
Organizations and companies can “game” search engines – it’s a process called SEO (”search engine optimization”) and they pay very well for experts in the field to design their sites and register them in certain databases in such a way as to ensure a high page rank. To my knowledge, you can’t pay Google or Yahoo to position your site at a certain position among the results. In Google’s case, you can buy “sponsored links” that are linked to certain sites and appear adjacent to search results and are clearly labelled as advertisements. I’m not sure how the others work…
Very interesting…I never thought to look at different search engines…google has always been my favourite! Will definitely use more in future!