Communicated by Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, July 1, 2006 (received for review March 2, 2006)
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the web despite its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page ranking strategies, and it has been argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. This bias could lead to a dangerous monopoly of information. We show that, contrary to intuition, empirical data do not support this conclusion; popular sites receive far less traffic than predicted. We discuss a model that accurately predicts traffic data patterns by taking into consideration the topical interests of users and their searching behavior in addition to the way search engines rank pages. The heterogeneity of user interests explains the observed mitigation of search engines’ popularity bias.
Author contributions: S.F., A.F., F.M., and A.V. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.
Conflict of interest statement: No conflicts declared.
↵ ‖ According to the Search Engine Round Table blog, WebSideStory Vice President Jay McCarthy announced at a 2005 Search Engine Strategies Conference that the number of page referrals from search engines had surpassed those from other pages. A more conservative estimate was obtained by monitoring web requests from a computer science department (15).
↵ ** Hindman, M., Tsioutsiouliklis, K. & Johnson, J. A., Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 3–6, 2003, Chicago, IL.
