Searching and Filter Bubbles

Searching

The action of performing a broad search based on a phrase or keyword specified by the user. Searches are utilized greatly by users using web search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Which are designed to run complex algorithms to scan vast number of webpages that is stored in their indexes for the term specified. The results may be webpages, images, video, information and other types of files. When using a search engine component, the algorithm establishes a search using indexes in the corresponding site’s database. This software application known as a Web Crawler, is an internet bot that systematically analyzes the database to perform web indexing. These algorithms return search results in list form; the top is what’s analyzed to be the most accurate to the topic proceeding to the most generic.

History

The history of searching the internet consists of the development of numerous search engines.

• Archie - In 1990 the first legacy search engine Archie or "Archive" without the "v" was developed. The FTP site hosted an index of downloadable directory that was available to it's clients. At the time technology didn't support large quantities of space which limited the potential of the system. Only listings were available and not the contents for each site.
• Veronica and Jughead - Searched file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems
• Vlib - Time Berners-Lee set up a Virtual Library. CERN web server hosted a list of web servers in the early age of the Internet.
• Excite - Was created by six Stanford undergrads in 1993. Brought by @Home on January 19,1999 for 6.5 billion dollars. Bankruptcy led to Infospace purchasing it in 2001 for 10 million.
• World Wide Web Wanderer - Developed by Matthew Gray in 1993. Bot counts active web servers and "measures the growth" of the internet. Bot was soon upgraded to capture actual URLs. Database was called the Wandex.
• Primitive Web Search - Jump Station: Info about page's title and header using simple linear search. World Wide Web Worm: Indexed titles and URLs.
• AltaVista - Developed In January 1994, it was the first search engine to allow natural language queries. It's algorithm featured advanced searching techniques and the concepts of adding or deleting clients URLs. In 2003 Yahoo bought Overture in 2003.
• WebCrawler - Designed in 1994, this was the first bot created that indexed entire pages. Being so popular servers couldn't support the accessibility of the shear number of clients during the daytime.
• Yahoo - Created by David Filo and Jerry Yang in 1994. Yahoo initially was a collection of favorable web pages and with the consistent increases in size made it a searchable directory. The Yahoo didn't implement their search engine until 2002 when they began acquiring other search directories. Until that time they had outsourced their search services.
• Google - Larry and Sergey began working on BackRub , a search engine which utilized back links for searching. It ranked pages using citation notation, meaning any mention of a website on another site would count it as a vote toward the mentioned site. A website's "authority" or reliability came from how many people linked to that site, and how trustworthy the linking sites were.

Filter Bubble

“Filter bubble” is a term by Internet activist Eli Pariser associated with searching the World Wide Web. A filter bubble is a result state in which a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user (such as location, past click behavior and search history) and, as a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.

Google for "BP" and got investment news about British Petroleum while another searcher got information about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and that the two search results pages were "strikingly different." The bubble effect may have negative implications for civic discourse, according to Pariser, but there are contrasting views suggesting the effect is minimal and addressable.

Concept

Holly Green says it's necessary for business leaders to get ideas, perspectives, and opinions from diverse sources. According to political activist and former executive director of moveon.org, Eli Pariser, Internet giants like Google, Yahoo and Facebook have begun using algorithms to determine what we see and hear online. He discovered this when he realized that Facebook had removed all the links to conservative people from his Facebook page - without his permission or knowledge.

Eli Pariser Beware online "filter bubbles"