Types of Search Engine Bias

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TYPES OF SEARCH ENGINE BIAS

RANKING

Biases that are influenced by the culture and mindset of the search engine designers or the users.

Personalization

Occurs when search engines employ some method of personalisation to suit a user, customizing search results based on details held within a personal profile of the user.

Systematic

PageRank is a notable systematic bias that has caused many problems in the encouraging of a neutral web due to the influencers it collates to judge page quality and relevance.

A functional bias embedded in the search engine.

Sensationalist

Can result in current news stories or trends at the time of query "overshadowing" typical results.

The phenomenon of preferring an outlier result over what the searcher actually desired.

Commercial

Results may be ranked higher than others based on the associated monetary gain for the search engine from this result and not on the actual quality of the resource.

A situation involving search engines using paid-for placement strategies and advertising to increase revenue and make operating a search engine a profitable venture.

CRAWLING

Sampling

This can manifest itself in web search engines when a web crawler does not cover the whole web, thus leaving some web pages inaccessible through the search engine.

Where the statistical sample set is not truely representative of the whole.

USAGE

Inductive

When a user does not know how to use the engine correctly or how to search the web effectively (i.e. may believe Google is the only search engine that should be used to browse the web).

Search engine may accidentally favour one kind of result over another.

May occur when a student (the search engine or user) learns imperfectly from some teacher.

Confirmation

Bias resulting from our tendency to seek information that will confirm our own pre-existing opinions. www.quantum3.co.za/CI Glossary.htm

Cultural

Biases that are influenced by the culture and mindset of the search engine designers or the users.

INDEXING

Security

This kind of bias could be positive if it has a very high accuracy and does not discriminate against legitimateweb pages. However there are concerns over howsearch engines classify pages and domains as security threats and spam.

Can involve not indexing a web site which is known or suspected of having a computer security threat, may exist in engines in an attempt to stop users from getting to the web page.

Language

May exist, for instance due to the difficulty of expressing a query in a particular language, use of synonyms, or in relation to search engine designers optimising their engines for one language or a small group of languages.

Political

Where a search engine favours a specific view of the world (based on politics, the media, etc.) over other viewpoints that are not based on impartiality. Manifests itself due to the search engine designers’ own affiliations or funding gained from a particular media outlet or political organisation. Results in censorship.

Content

Most search engines are more able to index textual data more thouroughly. The semantic contents of photographs, animations, videos, audio, scripts, games, etc are more difficult to extract and manipulate.

Bias of a search engine toward or against particular types of content.