Googlearchy

"Googlearchy" was described as ways in which a search engine, like Google, can influence politics and social reality in general. Physically the Internet consists of large numbers of computers connected by wires or by wireless links. However in logical terms the World Wide Web consists of pages; which are connected by hyperlinks. Google has become one of the world's most valuable companies by exploiting the insight that the structure of these hyperlinks conveys meaningful information about which sites users want to see ranked highly in Internet searches. Hindman points out that existing research has shown that over the entire web the distribution of inbound and outbound hyperlinks follows a power law. Traffic in the form of readership follows a similar power law distribution. Hindman and his team tested this by generating lists of political sites from search engines and then building web robots to crawl the sites following links three deep. Accordingly starting with 12 lists of 200 sites, their robots downloaded about 3 million pages; which were classified for relevance to politics and the distribution of links ascertained. This detailed work confirmed the applicability of a power law for links to these political websites. He devises a new word "Googlearchy": rule by the most heavily linked. Hindman makes three key points from his work, 1) the number of links pointing to a site is the most important determinant of its visibility. Site with many inbound links should be easy to find and should receive more traffic. 2) For every category of website, a small portion of the group should receive most of the links and most of the traffic so that winners take all. 3) The dominance of a niche becomes self-perpetuating. Heavily linked sites continue to attract more links; more visitors and more resources while sites with few links remain ignored.