On the Political Economy of Link-based Web Search

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the political economy of link-based web search, revealing how it favors capital, exacerbates unpaid digital labor, and leads to ecological and quality issues, urging exploration of alternative models.

Contribution

It provides an in-depth political economy analysis of link-based web search, highlighting its socio-economic contradictions and implications for future search paradigms.

Findings

Link-based search favors capital and long-term structural changes.

It accentuates unpaid digital labor and ecological unsustainability.

Degrading quality of search results is linked to internal contradictions.

Abstract

Web search engines arguably form the most popular data-driven systems in contemporary society. They wield a considerable power by functioning as gatekeepers of the Web, with most user journeys on the Web beginning with them. Starting from the late 1990s, search engines have been dominated by the paradigm of link-based web search. In this paper, we critically analyze the political economy of the paradigm of link-based web search, drawing upon insights and methodologies from critical political economy. We draw several insights on how link-based web search has led to phenomena that favor capital through long-term structural changes on the Web, and how it has led to accentuating unpaid digital labor and ecologically unsustainable practices, among several others. We show how contemporary observations on the degrading quality of link-based web search can be traced back to the internal contradictions with the paradigm, and how such socio-technical phenomena may lead to a disutility of the link-based web search model. Our contribution is primarily on enhancing the understanding of the political economy of link-based web search, and laying bare the phenomena at work, and implicitly catalyze the search for alternative models.