Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet there is growing concern with how algorithms, which run just beneath the surface of our interactions online, are affecting society. This timely new edition of Search Engine Society enlightens readers on the forms of bias that algorithms introduce into our knowledge and social spaces, drawing on recent changes to technology, industries, policies, and research. It provides an introduction to the social place of the search engine and addresses crucial questions such as: How have search engines changed the way we organize our thoughts about the world, and how we work? To what extent do politics shape search, and does search shape politics? This book is a must-read for those who wish to understand the future of the social internet and how search shapes it.

Search engines have become a key part of our everyday lives. Yet there is growing concern with how algorithms, which run just beneath the surface of our interactions online, are affecting society. This timely new edition of Search Engine Society enlightens readers on the forms of bias that algorithms introduce into our knowledge and social spaces, drawing on recent changes to technology, industries, policies, and research. It provides an introduction to the social place of the search engine and addresses crucial questions such as: How have search engines changed the way we organize our thoughts about the world, and how we work? To what extent do politics shape search, and does search shape politics? This book is a must-read for those who wish to understand the future of the social internet and how search shapes it.

Invisible Search and Online Search Engines considers the use of search engines in contemporary everyday life and the challenges this poses for media and information literacy. Looking for mediated information is mostly done online and arbitrated by the various tools and devices that people carry with them on a daily basis. Because of this, search engines have a significant impact on the structure of our lives, and personal and public memories. Haider and Sundin consider what this means for society, whilst also uniting research on information retrieval with research on how people actually look for and encounter information. Search engines are now one of society’s key infrastructures for knowing and becoming informed. While their use is dispersed across myriads of social practices, where they have acquired close to naturalised positions, they are commercially and technically centralised. Arguing that search, searching, and search engines have become so widely used that we have stopped noticing them, Haider and Sundin consider what it means to be so reliant on this all-encompassing and increasingly invisible information infrastructure. Invisible Search and Online Search Engines is the first book to approach search and search engines from a perspective that combines insights from the technical expertise of information science research with a social science and humanities approach. As such, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students working on and studying information science, library and information science (LIS), media studies, journalism, digital cultures, and educational sciences.

This book provides a broad introduction to search engines by integrating five different perspectives on Web search and search engines that are usually dealt with separately: the technical perspective, the user perspective, the internet-based research perspective, the economic perspective, and the societal perspective. After a general introduction to the topic, two foundational chapters present how search tools can cover the Web’s content and how search engines achieve this by crawling and processing the found documents. The next chapter on user behavior covers how people phrase their search queries and interact with search engines. This knowledge builds the foundation for describing how results are ranked and presented. The following three chapters then deal with the economic side of search engines, i.e., Google and the search engine market, search engine optimization (SEO), and the intermingling of organic and sponsored search results. Next, the chapter on search skills presents techniques for improving searches through advanced search interfaces and commands. Following that, the Deep Web and how its content can be accessed is explained. The two subsequent chapters cover ways to improve the quality of search results, while the next chapter describes how to access the Deep Web. Last but not least, the following chapter deals with the societal role of search engines before the final chapter concludes the book with an outlook on the future of Web search. With this book, students and professionals in disciplines like computer science, online marketing, or library and information science will learn how search engines work, what their main shortcomings are at present, and what prospects there are for their further development. The different views presented will help them to understand not only the basic technologies but also the implications the current implementations have concerning economic exploitation and societal impact.

Web search engines are not just indispensable tools for finding and accessing information online, but have become a defining component of the human condition and can be conceptualized as a complex behavior embedded within an individual's everyday social, cultural, political, and information-seeking activities. This book investigates Web search from the non-technical perspective, bringing together chapters that represent a range of multidisciplinary theories, models, and ideas.

Recent technological progress in computer science, Web technologies, and the constantly evolving information available on the Internet has drastically changed the landscape of search and access to information. Current search engines employ advanced techniques involving machine learning, social networks, and semantic analysis. Next Generation Search Engines: Advanced Models for Information Retrieval is intended for scientists and decision-makers who wish to gain working knowledge about search in order to evaluate available solutions and to dialogue with software and data providers. The book aims to provide readers with a better idea of the new trends in applied research.

Algorithms are not to be regarded as a technical structure but as a social phenomenon - they embed themselves, currently still very subtle, into our political and social system. Algorithms shape human behavior on various levels: they influence not only the aesthetic reception of the world but also the well-being and social interaction of their users. They act and intervene in a political and social context. As algorithms influence individual behavior in these social and political situations, their power should be the subject of critical discourse - or even lead to active disobedience and to the need for appropriate tools and methods which can be used to break the algorithmic power.