Search Engines & Social Media

It almost seems quaint, nowadays, the focus of some of us a few years back, at the start of this millennium, on the supposed monopolization of the search engine by Google.

Three political scientists coined the term "Googlearchy" in 2003, in this passage:

Though no one expected that every page on the Web would receive an exactly equal share of attention, many have assumed that the Web would be dramatically more egalitarian in this regard than traditional media. Our empirical results, however, suggest enormous disparities in the number of links pointing to political sites in a given category. In each of the highly diverse political communities we study, a small number of heavily-linked sites receive more links than the rest of the sites combined, effectively dominating the community they are a part of […]

It seems quaint because we've all made our peace with search engines, as part of our normal working life.

The action, the controversy, has moved on to social media. As Sabine Hossenfelder puts it, fear of the most heavily LINKED has faded, but now we have fear of the most heavily LIKED.

Great. I didn't enjoy the letter N anyway.

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