Search Engines Considered Harmful: In Search of an Unbiased Web Ranking

March 10, 2005
Junghoo Cho | UCLA

In this talk, we discuss the widespread use of Web search engines and its potential impact on the ecology of the Web. Recent studies show that a significant portion of Web accesses are referred by search engines. Furthermore, the Web-search market is increasingly dominated by a few key players. What are the implications of this heavy reliance of Web users on search engines in their pursuit of information? For example, given that search engines return currently “popular” pages at the top of search results, are we somehow penalizing newly-created pages that are not very well known yet? Are popular pages getting even more popular while new pages are being completely ignored? We first show that this unfortunate trend indeed exists on the Web through an experimental study based on real Web data. We then analytically estimate how much longer it takes for a new page to attract a large number of Web users when search engines return only popular pages at the top of search results. Finally, we develop new ways of ranking Web pages that can significantly reduce the potential bias of existing ranking metrics. Finally, we develop new ways of ranking Web pages that can significantly reduce the potential bias of existing ranking metrics. We believe that our proposed ranking metric has the potential to alleviate the “rich-get-richer” phenomenon and help new and high-quality pages get the attention that they deserve.

Speaker Details

Junghoo (John) Cho is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles. He received his Bachelors degree in Physics from Seoul National University in 1996 and his Computer Science Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2002. His research interests are in databases and Web technologies. He is particularly interested in information discovery, integration and search on the Web and has published many research papers in this area. He is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award.