What is the issue?
US President Donald Trump recently accused Internet giant Google of abusing its monopoly over online search.
What is the concern?
- Google has become an inalienable part of almost everyone’s online life.
- However, not a lot is known about how the search engine works and how it picks results.
- Google does not disclose much about its search formula because of two reasons:
- its entire business is based on it
- a lot of people would try to game the system if they got to know how it was done
How does Google possibly work?
- The primary factor that determines the Google algorithm is the PageRank formula.
- Under this, it gave value to how many sites are linked to a certain page.
- There are many other factors that help a page to rank well.
- These may include the URL structure, headlines, bounce rate of the page, and the time spent on the page.
- There is a whole industry that is built around trying to understand this system.
- It does this by incorporating pages with keywords and packing in other elements to help a page do better.
- But this so-called search engine optimisation (or SEO) does not always help.
- As, other factors like authority of the website and its tradition cannot be faked.
- Over the years, Google has updated its algorithm at regular intervals to prevent people from taking advantage of it.
- Each update brings some pages up and others down.
What is Trump's allegation?
- Trump alleged that Google was “suppressing positive stories” about his administration.
- E.g. the negative stories are being done by authoritative websites like The New York Times or CNN.
- The positive stories are limited to the relatively small rightwing sites.
- Given the discussed algorithm, the negative stories are likely to show up on top more often.
- Google has said its search is not affected by political ideology in any way.
- However, it has been found that 0.25% of its daily traffic is linked to intentionally misleading, false or offensive information.
- This is where it tweaked the algorithm, leading to complaints of a drop in traffic for many sites.
What next?
- Google moves towards a search format where users don’t really have to search to find a result.
- It is using artificial intelligence and machine learning to pre-empt a query and surface a result.
- This could mean results get prioritised and are hence not really neutral.
Source: Indian Express