In the top 10 search engines globally Google leads with 82.80 per cent, followed by Yahoo with 6.42 per cent, Baidu 4.89 per cent, Bing 3.91 per cent, Yandex 1.7 per cent, Ask 0.52 per cent and AOL 0.3 per cent as at May 2011.
ITRealms recalls
that experts at Wikipedia
described a web search engine as a software code that is designed to search for
information on the World Wide Web (www).
Notable is that the search results are generally presented
in a line of results often referred to as search engine results pages (SERP's).
Hence, the information may be a specialist in web pages, images, information
and other types of files. While some search engines also mine data available in
databases or open directories.
They also explained that unlike web directories, which are
maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time
information by running an algorithm on a web crawler.
However, the AIBRT claim is given weight with the growing
number of search engines and Internet adaption globally, which currently stood
at about 2,405,518,376 internet users on June 30, 2012 with Africa recording 167,385,751
Internet users as at December 31, 2012.
ITRealms gathered
that the researchers led by Dr. Epstein Robertson noted that even more
worrisome is the fact that these search engine companies lead by Google as most
outstanding could probably be pushed to almost 100 per cent of votes in any
electoral process with adequate resources available to the company.
According to him, about 75 per cent of participants in
democratic process were unaware that any manipulation could take place in the
first instance.
He pointed out that in a second experiment, his team discovered
that the manipulation could be masked, boosting the number of people who were
oblivious to the manipulation to over 85 per cent, a figure that Dr. Epstein
says, could be advanced to the highest figure.
“These results are
really shocking,” Dr. Epstein said, adding that his team knew that voters are
exposed to a large variety of influences during political campaigns: television
advertisements, rallies, debates, and newspaper support.
However, search ranking manipulation could exert a
disproportionately large influence over voters for a number of reasons.
“Most sources of
influence are explicit and obvious in their support of one candidate or party,
for example a newspaper article might be clearly one sided, making it easier to
see the manipulation. Ranking changes are, in theory, undetectable and those
searching don’t know that they are only being presented with one side of the
story.
“People approach
Google from the perspective that what it tells you is unbiased or neutral. But as a business, that company or any
company, will certainly favor some candidates over others – candidates that are
good for the business.”
The study
was conducted under the auspices of the American Institute for Behavioral
Research and Technology in Vista, California (USA), a non-profit, non-partisan
research organization.
Remmy Nweke
ITREALMS Online ... delivering news for ICT4D
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