Googlearchy: Does Google Control Too Much?

I’m still not sure what to think after reading Hindman’s chapters.  I always found Google to be like my own personal Yoda that could bring me to anything, anywhere, by simply putting in a few words or even a few letters and I could narrow down my search and it was easier for me.  What Hindman is arguing, is that it might be easier for you to search things on the internet, and it might even be easy to write your own posts, but it is difficult to get your voice hear on the internet as he believes there is nothing democratic about it.  He looks to political websites and campaigns to exemplify his refute over internet democracy.  He explains the layers of the internet from the hardware to the transit to the content and then brings up hyperlinking, which he states, “The interlocking patterns that hyperlinks form are the reason the medium was named the Web in the first place…PageRank, the ranking algorithm that powers Google search engine, relies largely on the link structure of the Web to order its results.” (Hindman Page 40)  Basically he is saying, that we all go on the internet to look for information or to find something, but that website doesn’t matter if someone cannot find it and therefore the site receives no traffic and is just floating around cyber space with no people looking at it just because it didn’t rank well in the PageRank.  From what I gather from the reading, it seems that Hindman find this hyperlinking and search engines to be somewhat of a popularity contest and unfair to the rest of the websites out there who may not get as much attention as others as he states, “A few popular sites…receive large portion of the total links; less successful sites…receive hardly any links at all.  Traffic, like link structure follows a power law of distribution with roughly the same parameters.” (Hindman Page 42).  In using his example of the political sphere he looks to display the, “biases these limitations [hyperlinks and search engines] introduce in the number and types of sites encountered by typical users.” (Hindman Page 46).   

In other words, Google has become the most popular search engine and has 60 percent of the search engine market and with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo combined controlling 95%.  In regards to political sites, they are receiving no way near the same amount of traffic as sites such as porn or webmail, and it is because of the dominance of hyperlinks of other sites and a somewhat discrimination on the part of search engines, according to Hindman.  Hindman points out this is almost like a monopoly in the sense that everyone goes to Google and therefore are only going to see what Google thinks or ranks as important rather than some other search engines who might have more or different results.  When it comes to traffic the search engines can be seen as gatekeepers or mediators and even Hindman admits they can be both.  Search engines direct a large volume of traffic, he is questioning why certain sites get more or less.

HINDMAN'S GOOGLEARCHY

            I can see where Hindman is coming from when it comes to the search engines not being as democratic as we’d like to believe they are.  But as a user of the internet, frankly I just want something that is going to get me the quickest answer possible.  That’s what the internet has done for this generation.  We want instant gratification because we are used to clicking a link and something just appearing within seconds, and that is what I look for in a search engine.  I don’t want to go through a number of url’s just to find something appropriate.  I d rather type in a few words and have a search engine figure it out for me.  As for the search engine’s gatekeeper-like qualities, I think about what Deanna Zandt had said in her piece (Deanna Zandt) about how getting your site popularity is like working a cocktail party.  You don’t just stand on a table and scream your name for all to hear but rather you mingle, maybe give a business card to someone, and let them be your reference so others will want to know you (see your website).  I understand that Google owns a large amount of the search engine traffic which is clear as exemplified in Alexa’s Top 500 Sites (http://www.alexa.com/topsites) with Google taking the number one slot of most popular site visited and yahoo taking the number 4 slot.  I get that it probably does border on monopolizing, and yes that could lead to issues of only getting content from one area (as we have seen in media and communication history, things don’t necessarily work out when one company dominates a market such as AT&T or IBM) but I’d like to hear what would be a probable and viable solution to this issue that Hindman brings up.