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Web Search Studies: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Web Search Engines

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International Handbook of Internet Research

Abstract

Perhaps the most significant tool of our internet age is the web search engine, providing a powerful interface for accessing the vast amount of information available on the world wide web and beyond. While still in its infancy compared to the knowledge tools that precede it – such as the dictionary or encyclopedia – the impact of web search engines on society and culture has already received considerable attention from a variety of academic disciplines and perspectives. This article aims to organize a meta-discipline of “web search studies,” centered around a nucleus of major research on web search engines from five key perspectives: technical foundations and evaluations; transaction log analyses; user studies; political, ethical, and cultural critiques; and legal and policy analyses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to the Pew internet & American Life Project, 84% of American adult internet users have used a search engine to seek information online (Fallows, 2005: 1), making searching the web the second most popular online activity (behind using e-mail) (Rainie, 2005). In August 2007, over 750 million people worldwide over the age of 15 conducted a search, totaling more than 61 billion searches (Burns, 2007).

  2. 2.

    The first full-text web search engine was WebCrawler, launched in 1994 (InfoSpace, 2007), making search engines relative “teenagers” compared to other tools and technologies for organizing and retrieving information. Encyclopedias, for example, date back to the first century AD.

  3. 3.

    These categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive and are not put forth as airtight ontological divisions. They are meant simply to help organize this interdisciplinary collection of studies to aid discussion.

  4. 4.

    Critical responses to PageRank, and Google overall, will be discussed below.

  5. 5.

    For a comparison of web search engine ranking algorithms, see Borodin, Roberts, Rosenthal, and Tsaparas (2001).

  6. 6.

    For a summary of literature on search engine design, see Arasu, Cho, Garcia-Molina, Paepcke, and Raghavan (2001).

  7. 7.

    A library of research on information retrieval systems can be found at the website for the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval: http://www.sigir.org/proceedings/Proc-Browse.html.

  8. 8.

    These concerns relate to some of the cultural and social issues that will be discussed in more detail below.

  9. 9.

    See “Regulating Search?: A Symposium on Search Engines, Law, and Public Policy” (http://isp.law.yale.edu/regulatingsearch/overview/).

  10. 10.

    See “The Law of Search Engines” (http://law.haifa.ac.il/events/event_sites/se/).

  11. 11.

    See http://www.law.umaryland.edu/journal/jbtl/index.asp.

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  1. School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

    Michael Zimmer

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  1. Dept. Political Science, Virginia Tech, Major Williams Hall 531, Blacksburg, 24061, USA

    Jeremy Hunsinger

  2. Peachtree St. NE., 620, Atlanta, 30308, USA

    Lisbeth Klastrup

  3. Fac. Media, Society & Culture, Curtin University, Kent St., Bentley, 6102, Australia

    Matthew Allen

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Zimmer, M. (2009). Web Search Studies: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Web Search Engines. In: Hunsinger, J., Klastrup, L., Allen, M. (eds) International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_31

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