Week 4 lecture for MECO3602 Online Media at University of Sydney, 'Duck Duck Go[ogle]: The politics of search'.

1. Duck Duck Go(ogle): The Politics
of Search
Jonathon Hutchinson
jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au
@dhutchman

2. Don’t forget…
• We need a guest tweeter this week?
• Use the #meco3602 hashtag during the
lecture to engage with the content
• http://onlinemedia3602.wordpress.com/
• FB page as conversation space:
https://www.facebook.com/meco3602
• Email your blog URL to me:
jonathon.huthinson@sydney.edu.au

3. Online Media week 6
Avoiding the Googlization of
everything

4. Pew Internet Research Findings

7. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_X6EyqXa2
s

8. Highest ranking search engines .au
Hitwise, US 2014

9. How works
3 parts running on a distributed network of thousands of
low-cost servers or ‘server farms’ = fast parallel
processing.
1. Googlebot - a web crawler application (‘spider’) that
finds and fetches web pages.
2. The Indexer - sorts every word on every page and stores
the resulting index of words in a huge database (includes
‘PageRank’ of links to your page)
3. The Query Processor - compares your search query to the
index and recommends the most relevant documents

10. Google Juice
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player
_embedded&v=BNHR6IQJGZs

11. Google Juice
• Break into small groups of 5 or 6
• If you are comfortable, Google yourself
• Are the results surprising?
• How do they relate to the Finklestein reading?

12. Economy of hyperlinks
• The economy of links is service oriented, and the service
to you is acknowledged through your link.
• By linking to A, you pay A for giving your users content,
lifting A’s PageRank in a search.
• Return links to your site lift your PageRank, adding to your
financial value, inducing greater traffic…and potentially
more links.
• So links have value. They are a recommendation to view
and they convey authority…even where your content is
critical of the linked site.

13. Google’s corporate ideology
1. Provide perfect search – an algorithm that allows
internet content users to determine the ‘best’
possible results
2. Present your activities as ethical – “don’t be evil”
ie. we will collect as much information as we can,
but be trustworthy in its use
3. Present your activities as politically irreproachable
– “democracy on the web works” or link votes
equal representative value

14. Ethics of hyperlinks
Google search is not ‘impartial’ as:
• rating pages with lots of inbound links can reinforce
the power of social networks and support information
oligarchies
• results can be filtered to meet political ends
• it can promote hate sites as easily as more balanced,
accurate sources
• it does not acknowledge the advertorial linking that is
paid for by companies
• it has reduced the power of the‘elite influencers’(e.g.
news organisations) who structure the value of
information through news bulletin order, page
placement etc.

16. The Google ‘Conspiracy’
• For every search, Google saves IP number,
country and location, time, search terms
• From 2005, the US Administration has
subpoenaed the search data of several search
engines.
• From 2010 Google has been subject to national
government scrutiny around the world for
illegally collecting wireless network data in its
Street View project
• From 2012 it is collating individuated user data
across all its services
• Google is "a ticking privacy time bomb.“ Marc
Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center
• The NSA’s Prism surveillance program is proof
of that ticking time bomb

18. The hidden web
• The web had over 1 trillion URLs in 2008
• People create several billion pages per day
• Search engines only index a fraction of this
content
• They don’t find material that is housed
- in databases that require passwords, or
- on pages with few links, or
- in pages that owners have deliberately
excluded (eg. where media companies like
News Ltd exclude their news from search).

19. Alternative search engines
• Yippy – yippy.com
clustering search engines - which group semantically
related information to increase the relevance.
• Voxalead - http://voxaleadnews.labs.exalead.com/
multimedia speech transcription search - which
searches inside the speech text of video and audio
content
• Dogpile - http://www.dogpile.com/ metasearch engines
- give search terms to other engines and collate their
results (less likely to store results = greater privacy of
search)
• Duck Duck Go – https://duckduckgo.com specialises ‘in
protecting searcher’s privacy and avoiding the filter
bubble’

20. Semantic search engines
A perfect search engine would deliver intuitive
results based on users’ past searches and
general browsing history…knowing, for
example, whether a search for the keywords
‘Washington’ and ‘apple’ is meant to help a
user locate Apple Computer stores in
Washington, D.C. or nutritional information
about the Washington variety of the fruit.
(Zimmer, First Monday, 2008)

21. Why ‘Search’ for an entire week?
• To improve your ability to source and find
information
• To use alternative sources to locate
information in the ‘hidden’ web
• Use your new found search power for good (of
your investigative journalism projects)

22. Conclusion
• Understanding the contexts in which
information is produced and indexed
• Understanding the cultures of
information production and exchange
• Using the right search, indexing & social
media tools for your project

23. For your assignments:
• How does web search impact on political,
economical and social hierarchies?
• What types of activities occur on the ‘dark
net’ and what are implications of these
activities?
• What are the implications of the ‘filter
bubble’?