Searching for Online Democracy

Googlearchy, as Hindman states, is “the rules of the most heavily linked,” and has an impact on the online political landscape. Sites with the most inbound links, for example, are more easily found, receive more traffic and appear first in search results. The sites with more inbound links or hyperlinks, therefore, are more likely to attract more attention and remain their high rankings.  Surely, Google is probably the number one search engine a lot of Internet users use to simply look up or find more online information. According to Alexa’s Top 500 sites, Google is indeed the “top” search engine that drives traffic on the Web. Yet there is a limit to Googlearchy. Hindman suggests that not everything is being covered or found on Web sites because users, who most likely know little, take shortcuts to find information. In addition, since there is a lot of online information, users are more likely to just skim through what they find.

In Chapter 4 of The Myth of Digital Democracy, Hindman suggests that much of the traffic on the Web is primarily due to search engines. Search engines have a great impact on driving traffic to Web sites because a majority of people use search engines to retrieve online information and links to websites that match their searches. Hindman notes that most users who use search engines are “unsophisticated” and use short and general words and phrases on search engines. 85 percent of users do not look past the first page of results, which may limit a user’s opportunity to find the most suitable result.

In addition, Hindman suggests that the process of “narrowcasting,” influence the traffic on the Web as well as reserve information to a marginalized group, which not only limit the voice of others but also disrupts any democratic notion on the Web since not everyone’s voice is being heard. The structure of the Web allows certain groups to obtain online information in a way that follows link distributions based on the most popular sites, which seems unfair to the rest of the websites that receive little traffic or gets neglected by users.

In a sense, Hindman suggests that search engines do not contribute to the democratic norms and modes on the Web. It seems that a user’s ability to access to all Web sites is taken for granted because the structure of the Web and how online information is being transmitted, as Hindsman suggests, through hyperlinking and search engines, is gravitated towards a particular group, like in political websites and campaigns, and based on the popularity of Web sites, which are most likely to show up in the first page of search results on Google or other search engines and eventually limits a user’s chances of finding other unfound Web sites that may be of help.