Political affects of Google VS other Search Engines

 In chapter three of “Myth and Digital Democracy” Hindman uses the term ‘Googlearchy’ to define all search engine’s (but the most popular being google) influence over the both social and poltical realities. It also explains the visibility of a site with the amount of links that bring you to it or that it has within. In other words, search engines are directly correalated with politics. People use search engines to find political websites which can influence the user’s political opinions. Hindman uses google’s dominance over other web searches as a monopoly. It controls and influences the most people. Basically, if all the information is received from the same place (or other places like Yahoo and Microsoft – the other two most popular) the information can be biased. Thus there is not an even coverage on the sites in terms of politics. Hindman says that sites that are not in the mainstream get overlooked easily.

In chapter four, Hindman examines poltical sites more closely and evaluates the amount of people that actually use them by comparing them to other sites. He then raises the question ‘are political sites important?’ Based on what he discussed in the previous chapter and the small amount of interent users on these sites, I think we can conclude that these sites may not be all that important. Since the search engines are biased or just not built to give the user more obsecure results, maybe these sites lose importance. Hindman states that people like familiarity and do not like to venture onto other sites that may give the user more neutral content.

On the website, http://www.alexa.com/topsites, we see that Google is the number one most popular site followed by Facebook, YouTube and then Yahoo at fourth. This supports Hindman by proving the dominance Google has not only as a search engine, but as THE most popular website.