[governance] Halal Search Engine

[Lisa Horner]

Hi

I think what's important here is the principle of transparency.  As long
as gatekeepers of information (such as search engines) are transparent
about how they select content, including political, economic, cultural
etc criteria, it's not necessarily a problem. Transparency needs to be
coupled with "media literacy" amongst users.  They need to know that
information presented to them can be affected by the values and bias of
gatekeepers, and know how to find out about it and navigate around
information to find what they need.  Whilst the medium is very
different, the issues are similar to newspapers and broadcasters having
political bias.

Lisa

-----Original Message-----
From: Milton L Mueller [mailto:mueller at syr.edu] 
Sent: 06 September 2009 22:59
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Ian Peter; Avri Doria
Subject: RE: [governance] Halal Search Engine

You can pay to be listed in the CLEARLY MARKED and SEPARATED sponsored
links, which in fact attract far fewer clicks than the regular ones.
Google was the first to clearly separate them and NOT make their regular
rankings depend in any way on payments, and that of course is why it won
the market - it really was better for finding what you were looking for
than the alternatives. That set the standard for Bing, which is actually
a very good competitor now if you haven't tried it. All hail market
competition! What a friend we have in....Mammon!! Genuflect to Market
FUNDAMENTALISM ;-)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Peter [mailto:ian.peter at ianpeter.com]
> Sent: Sunday, September 06, 2009 3:52 PM
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Avri Doria
> Subject: Re: [governance] Halal Search Engine
> 
> ( a couple of people disputed this)
> 
> The most obvious example is that on any common Google search the first
few
> results that come through may be sponsored links - identified as such
if
> you
> have good eyes and bother to look, but the first results nevertheless.
You
> can pay to be number one on a Google search results listing, that's
the
> bottom line.
> 
> Beyond that - because Google doesn't release its algorithms this is
> unproven. But articles such as this
http://www.seobook.com/google-branding
> do tend to suggest new factors coming into results.
> 
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