What Search Engines Say About People

It is one thing to expand human knowledge through study and research, but altogether quite another thing to store information in a way that makes it easy to locate and retrieve. Some decades before the coming of the information age in the latter part of the twentieth century, researchers had already begun to appreciate the need for a way to search for information quickly and efficiently. The system of indexing in use back then made it time-consuming and tedious to search for data. When one source of information was located in the card catalog, the researcher had to start anew to find another source. Ultimately, it was not very productive. The search method became a real concern as the amount and type of information grew, and the means to store and transfer it changed from paper and fax to hard disk and e-mail.

Enter the search engine. In 1990, Alan Emtage at McGill University in Montreal created a web-based application called Archie, short for “archives”. Archie was the world’s first search engine and was adequate for its time as only several thousand websites existed in 1993 when people began using the Internet in earnest.

How exactly does a search engine work? It acts much like a spider that follows the threads of its web to a particular destination. The search engine has access to an index of content that exists on Web servers and is constantly being updated. After typing in the query, the service matches the user’s request to existing content and produces a list of links that relevant to the query. Google, the number one search engine today, uses a link analysis algorithm called PageRank to assign a numerical weighting to elements of a set of documents on the Web in order to measure its relative importance in the set. The user selects links from the generated list.

Interestingly, a study discovered that most searchers clicked on the results at the top of the list. Users seemed to have an inclination to zero in on the first two links even if they did not appear relevant. The study concluded that users had confidence in search engines, believing them to be designed to evaluate what is relevant to the query and to put the best links at the top of the list. It also suggested that people are not motivated to go through an entire list to determine which ones are really connected to their query. It didn’t help matters that as the number of web pages grew, the hits returned often numbered in the thousands and even millions. Search engine designers began including a brief summary for each entry to make it easier for the user to make a selection and refined some elements to reduce the number of returns. This did little, however, to change user habits.

What did change is how Internet content providers such as Google utilized user behavior in search engine design. For example, knowing that the first two links in a query-generated list were almost always clicked on, some search engines began putting favored links at the top of the list. In 2003, Google altered its search service; researchers were quick to note that it contained elements that were biased toward particular resources.

In time, the searches that people made would come into play when a user entered a query. In 2004, Google launched Google Suggest, a word completion service that predicts the word or phrase the user is typing in even before it has actually been typed in. Also called “autocomplete,” the feature accelerates searches by providing suggestions in the search engine box. Autocomplete quickly became a default service. Anyone who has used this service knows that typing in a single letter is sufficient to produce several suggestions. The letter “g”, for example, will generate a host of Google services—Gmail, Google maps, Google earth, Google translate, etc. What is worth paying attention to is that the service is based on a huge dataset of what the world is searching for. The suggestions appear because other people have previously typed them in. Why is this point worth considering?

The Internet is an authentic community, with members seeking to know what other members are doing. Some people have taken to typing key words simply to find out what information other people are seeking. The word “why” will yield such questions as “why is the sky blue,” “why do we yawn,” “why do cats purr,” and “why am I so tired”. Are these the things that people the world over want to know? As citizens of the Net, users now seem to be aware of the ponderings of fellow citizens. But is it not true that their thoughts are also ours?

With Google having 82 percent of the market share in searches, the content provider has the capacity to accurately measure what people want to know. It does this through Google Trends, a tool that tracks what information Google users are seeking during any given time span. In 2012, the top three searches were “Gangnam Style,” “Hurricane Sandy,” and “Whitney Houston”. Search engines are interactive and seem to provide some anonymity, giving them the potential to reveal so much more about what is on people’s minds than surveys, polls and questionnaires. Indeed, what users search for can provide researchers a wealth of data to help them understand the pulse of a people, no matter what region they come from.