Today's New York Times article by Hindman and Cukier
"More
News, Less Diversity" cites a
study
(with NEC) of linking for political sites. Their argument is
that existence of the Internet and its open linking is not support for
the
FCC
ruling that invites concentration news ownership. Phenomena observed
include: political topics are heavily dominated links to a few websites
(which search engines will prefer), few websites more than 1 link to them
(thus difficult to reach and not acknowledged by dominant sites), and winner-takes-all
behavior will increase traffic flow to top sites. The phenomena is dubbed
Googlearchy. This looks like a great experimental contribution to
web research, analyzing over 3M pages on multiple topics.
Our experiment on the sunny
personality of search engines has similar conclusions, that branding
and popularity will drown out dissent and controversy unless the searcher
deliberately seeks balanced results, work that the naive searcher is unlikely
to perform.
