Hindman's "Googlearchy"

Chapters 3 and 4 of Matthew Hindman's The Myth of Digital Democracy deal with how ordinary citizens use the Internet to find political websites and how the Internet changes or does not change the political landscape.

It has often been suggested that the Internet is a “narrowcasting” medium, which eliminates gatekeepers, levels the playing field, and gives a voice to the marginalized. These are all roles that I myself assumed the Internet took on but reading this chapter convinced me otherwise. It seems that there are other issues that keep people from being able to fully access all of the resources that can be found on the Internet. Hindman has come up with the term “Googlearchy,” or the rule of the most heavily linked, which suggests that only a small group of websites receives the most visitors because those websites are the most linked to. Websites that have few links are very much ignored. The way that sites are ranked is much like a popularity contest.

In visiting the website Alexa.com, it came as no surprise to me that I was completely familiar with all of the websites ranked in the top 25 sites in the United States. I would say that about 75% of the websites I visit on a regular basis were listed in the top 25. As Hindman writes in chapter 4, a lack of user sophistication contributes to why the top ranked websites continue to be the most visited. A majority of search engine users never click past the first page of results and some don't even scroll to the bottom of the first page. They simply click on the first links that come up. I find myself doing the same thing. When performing a search I can almost always find exactly what I was looking for within the first 5 links that appear. This shows how big a role search engines play in directing website traffic.

Because the amount of information that can be found online is so overwhelming, there is no realistic way for people to access it all. A Google search on the term “politics” alone brings up over 1 billion results. It only makes sense that a person would restrict their search to only the first one or two pages that come up as they list the most relevant and most visited websites related to the search.