Researchers at IU debunk 'Googlearchy'

A team of IU researchers from the School of Informatics came to an unexpected defense of major World Wide Web search engines with a recent study.\nThe findings contradict a popular view of the presence of a hierarchy among the engines, which suggests they cater to more predominant sites, known as the "Googlearchy" hypothesis. \n"The idea of the search engine bias has been around for a long time," IU School of Informatics researcher Filippo Menczer said. "Especially the views that the Googlearchy just makes popular pages more popular, particularly those with a lot of links."\nThe study, "The Egalitarian Effect of Search Engines," began after Menczer and team attended the annual World Wide Web conference. It was there that a paper done by researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles on the impact of Web search engines on page popularity first sparked Menczer's interest in the subject.\nUCLA's paper was the first to seriously study the possible existence of a Googlearchy among search engines and was particularly inspiring, Menczer said. \nExpecting to find evidence to further UCLA's claim of the reality of such a hierarchy, Menczer teamed with researchers and Informatics faculty members Santo Fortunato, Alessandro Flammini and Alessandro Vespignani. \n"When we set out to further the information of the UCLA study," Menczer said, "we didn't set out to contradict it. We just wanted to quantify it." \nBut after a six-month extension research period -- finally concluded this fall -- the data determined that the idea of a hierarchy among the engines is false, much to the surprise of the researchers. \n"We spent weeks on the data," Menczer said. "The more we looked the more we started to see something different." \nUsing famed search engines Google and Yahoo among others to secure data, the researchers found that highly trafficked sites were no more likely to appear continuously for entered queries than newer sites.\nAfter completion, the study stirred debates about the topic, something that didn't surprise Menczer.\n"If I would have read this data I would not have believed it at first," he said.\nAwaiting the acceptance of their study's appearance at this year's World Wide Web conference, Menczer said they are ready for a follow-up study.\n"We are also seeking some key funding from IU to help us develop this into a main research project, which would allow us to connect more data," he said.\nAnd it is IU's environment that will contribute to the project, Menczer said.\n"We have a very unique combination of expertise at IU," he said. "We can go beyond just the technical studies to see how this will affect people's lives and the effect it will have on the social implications of the Web"