More blurring of search engine results and advertising: A paper presented at the Sixth ACM Conference on E-commerce by Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology professor Jim Jansen indicates that consumers exhibit a substantial measure of bias against…
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The blurring of search engine results and advertising is a major concern given how search engines have become the "center of gravity" for the distribution of information and the acquisition of knowledge. ClickZ reports on a Consumer Reports WebWatch study…
SiliconValleyWatcher reports that Google plans to map the city of San Francisco in 3D using a fleet of laser-equipped trucks:Google plans to use trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to create a realistic 3D online version of San…
Siva Vaidhyanathan (a professor in my department, btw) has posted reader comments from his original request for feedback as to some of the concerns with of Google's plan to digitize library books. He was kind enough to include my repsonse,…
Yahoo! Research Labs released a beta version of a new search tool called Yahoo! Mindset allowing users to filter results on an axis of "shopping" (i.e., commercial) vs "researching" (i.e., non-commercial) sources. From their site: Find the results you like.Sort…
Siva Vaidhyanathan is working on a paper/talk about the social implications of Google's plan to digitize library books, and asks for feedback. The broadest issue is the widespread acceptance of the "Google paradigm" for organizing, distributing and accessing information. Google…
Philipp Lenssen uncovers Shmoogle, "the first non-deterministic search engine" that presents Google results in random order. From its creator, Tsila Hassine:What is Shmoogle? Shmoogle is a Google randomiser. When you type your query into Shmoogle, you get Google's results but....…
InsideGoogle points to this report about a group of academic publishers concerned about Google's plan to scan millions of library books into its Internet search engine index:The plan "appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale," wrote…
Continuing the on-going discussion of bias at GoogleNews, TechDirt links to this study (an MA thesis) which aims to measure the source bias in GoogleNews.The study examines search results for evidence of bias. By analyzing the content of articles returned…
John Battelle points to a piece (reg required) by Max Kalehoff noting the striking increase in traffic driven to Wikipedia from search engine queries.A ranking of all Web sites based on the total volume of traffic received directly from search…
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