TYPES OF SEARCH ENGINE BIAS

Content

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

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.

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.

Security

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.

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.

Cultural

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

Confirmation

Bias resulting from our tendency to seek information that will confirm our own pre-existing opinions.

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Inductive

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

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

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).

Sampling

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

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.

Commercial

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

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.

Sensationalist

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

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

Systematic

A functional bias embedded in the search engine.

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.

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.

Cultural

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