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

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 number of 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.  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.