Multiple Presents: How Search Engines Re-write the Past

TL;DR

This paper investigates how search engines' continuous updating affects the retrieval of historical web data, revealing that search results and information structures degrade over time, impacting research and temporal understanding.

Contribution

It analyzes the temporal dynamics of search engine indices and their implications for retrieving historical web information, highlighting the effects of updating frequencies.

Findings

Search results erode over time due to index updates.

Different search engines have varying update frequencies affecting data retrieval.

Temporal information in search results is unreliable for historical research.

Abstract

Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information at the internet for specific periods of time. However, these 'date stamps' are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the Web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added, and the search engine's crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.