“To existexist is to be indexed by search engines”.

(Introna & Nissenbaum, 2000)

Why search engines matter

Search engines (SE) became gatekeepers of our information.

Complexity and invisibility of SE technology.

Social consequences of SE technology adoption.

Who opens boxes of search technology?

Mostly marketers deal with “black boxes” of SE technology

Researchers put primary attention to technological and business aspects

Social sciences pay little attention to social consequences of broad usage of SE

Directories: applying library technologies to Web

Early Web was hand-made.

People manually structured best sites intro directories.

Yahoo was the most successful project of this kind.

With the time it became impossible to find and classify all existing sites.

Magic of robots The time of software

robots came. In 1993 first real search

engine appeared

Three equally important parts of search engine technology. Crawlers (robots, bots)

collect information Database of WebPages

(index) Query processor with

ranking algorithm and interface

Sinking in spam First SE dealt primarily

with pages metadata Soon search was polluted

by spammers (“optimizers”) Users browsed pages and

pages of search results looking for necessary information

Liberation mission of Google: its link algorithm solved many of spam problems

Drawbacks of SE technology

Increasing scale of SE economy In 2005 Google had more

than 175.000 servers, in 2009 - more than 1.000.000

Prospering SEO industry (link farms, googlebombing, etc) advancing your sites for money

Growth of invisible web

How to search invisible Web? Quickly growing number of

dark, deep, hidden or invisible web pages and sites They cannot be indexed

and found by main search engines

Invisible Web is heterogeneous: Corporate Intranet Proprietary sites Pages closed by owners for

crawlers Dynamic content in the

databases (typical for social media)

Social search: bots and people reunion

The more “networking” becomes the world - the more difficult to find relevant information using traditional SE technology

Ways out Develop more and more sophisticated

search Use different social search engines,

directories and direct “crowdsourcing”

More and more social media built their search on peoples’ recommendations and preferences

Three case studies: Twitter, Facebook and Ning

In 2008 Twitter, Facebook and Ning were among the fastest growing social sites

Twitter was the champion, Facebook won competition with MySpace, Ning reached the number of 1 million networks

Common and different in social media search

Do all social media suggest social search opportunities for finding information?

Twitter: real-time search

Twitter search tools

Searching for existing accounts (“Find people” page)

Twitter search engine (search.twitter.com) Purchasing of

Summise search engine (July 2008)

Integrating search into personal accounts (April 2009)

Is it new generation of search?

One hour delay for search results vs. instant search: does it matter? Google searches past Twitter gives possibility

of real-time search. In many cases they

supplement each other

Business foundation for instant search

Twitter is talking about different businesses in real time. As a result: People immediately

receive information about different brands

Businesses lost control over news about their brands

Today businesses are seeking for people’s feedback

Twitter search races

Several twitter search engines were launched recently Twazzup was launched in

April 2009 Twellow – directory

about users Cloud.li – cloud-based

Twitter search engine Tweetmatic – video

search for Twitter Twitterfall – real time

observation of search results

Third party search tools

Hashtags

Hashtags are people’s tool for tagging information on Twitter Hashtags.org and

Twemes.com provides real-time tracking of Twitter hashtags.

Twitterfall Gives an opportunity to

follow theme in Twitter in real time

Third party search tools

Twellow

Twitmatic video search Previously

Twitmatic was for seeing videos shared on Twitter

Recently the site became a platform for video search

Third party search toolsTwazzup

http://www.twazzup.com

Great for seeing links about a given topic.

Mix of real time search and top tweets.

In conclusion: Twitter search is developing and it’s impossible to predict its future architecture

Facebook vs. Google More and more Google

treats Facebook as its major rival in the search engine market.

Facebook search is social

It is based more on recommendations of the friends than random links

Google acknowledged plans of offering personalized, social-networking style to its search results

Facebook search system

Facebook search is numerous and sophisticated First level search box is

on right upper side of the home page

It is just for starting search on Facebook

Most of advanced opportunities are connected with friends search and groups search

Searching friends“You’re not real

friends unless you’re Facebook friends??”

Finding friends system is the most valuable part of Facebook search

Search is built on the basis of chosen networks and information added by current users

Searching friends

Email Friend Finder searching tool helps to find friends by email addresses

AIM Friend Finder

These tolls allow users effectively use Facebook database stuff

Facebook browsing Browsing networks feature give also great

opportunities for search

Your network affiliation allows effectively browse your chosen networks

Interest groups search Searching

groups Interest groups is

an important Facebook feature

Facebook search engine allows users effectively search different groups

In conclusion: Facebook search system is built on peoples preferences and really challenges “more objective” Google search

Ning networks

More than one million networks

Small functionality of Ning search engine for networks Absence of ranking mechanism and

other tools for searching (search between results, etc)

Necessity of separate search inside networks

Separate networks are hardly searchable with Ning search tools

Ning search drawbacks

The problem of finding necessary network

Browsing?Using Ning

search engine?

Ning directory Hand-made

directory can help!

Directory for networks search

People’s cooperation can help finding necessary networks Only combination of

Ning search, Ning directory and Google or other SE search engines can give relevant result

How do social media change?

Social media sites are based on Web 2.0 technology It allows them combining

search engine technologies with individual users’ search behaviors

Facebook search reached the best (is case of scale) results in combining these features

In what way do people influence searching technology?

People like to follow their friends’ recommendations

This feature influencing many new “Google killers” start-up projects

In fact, very few of them became successful On March 2009 Wikia search

engine was closed by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia

It reached only 10,000 unique users a month in comparison with Wikipedia having 30,000,000.

Social search and privacy issues

Everybody knows that you’re a dog

More and more private data are included in search

Privacy issues in integrating social search into search results

Underestimated social consequences

Search engine technologies generate new type of digital divide.

The border of second-level digital divide is between skilled users using search engines and unskilled (Halavais, A. 2009)

Majority of users choose “the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing” (Krug, S, 2006). Satisficing = satisfying

+sufficing

In conclusion

Search engine technology is huge and demands increasing number of servers, energy and money

Traditional search engines will preserve their significance

Page ranking will be more and more socially influenced

Instant search is challenging traditional search. Nevertheless, it cannot replace it and probably will coexist with traditional

Literature Brin, S, and Page, L, 1998 “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web

Search Engine”, delivered from http://infolab.stanford.edi/~backrub/google.html

Gori, M, Numerico, T. & Witter, I.H, 2007, “Web dragons: inside the myths of search engine technology”

Halavais, A. 2009, “Search engine society”

Introna, L.D. & Nissenbaum, H. 2000, “Shaping the web: why the politics of search engines matters,” The Information Society, 16, 3, pp. 169-85

Vossen, Gottfried, Hagemann Stephan (2007) “Unleashing Web 2.0. From concepts to creativity”, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

Kolbitsch, Josef, Maurer Hermann (2006), The Transformation of the Web: How Emerging Communities Shape the Information We Consume.

Krug, S, (2006), “Don’t Make Me Think. A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability”, New Riders.