Search Engine Society is the name of Alex Halavais‘ forthcoming book, due to be published by Polity in October 2008, as part of the Digital Media and Society series. Halavais is assistant professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University (USA), a ’social architect’, and blogs about politics, culture, teaching and research at a thaumaturgical compendium. With his book, Halavais aims to unpack the black box of the search engine, in order to counter a host of assumptions underlying both technological developments and the way we use search engines to make sense of the networked world.
Approaching search from a user perspective, Halavais notes that the diversity of searching skills represents yet another level of the digital divide as even the most basic search is a complicated action. Where students tend to ‘shop’ sites such as Wikipedia or IMDB before turning to the search engine, experienced users engage in a more ‘focused browsing’; carefully circling concepts while extracting, recording and recombining data until results are met. Reaching those parts of the web that aren’t easily indexed however, requires yet alternative strategies.
Search based on re-finding information have become a recent interest to researchers. Making use of the remembering web, for instance through bookmarking sites such as delicious, re-finding may become a profitable search strategy. Much the same goes for real-time search, the process of re-using those searches that have proved to work in the past. In this line of ‘query-free search’, an engine may provide ways to find conceptual similarities to previously found pages or documents. As users gain experience, searching tends to become more complex. Most general-purpose search engines seem ill equipped to meet this diversity of needs, often building on traditional methods. Another pressing problem in determining a search strategy is the engine’s constant updating of ranking algorithms, causing a state of flux that is all but transparent.
