The egalitarian effect of search engines

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that search engines, contrary to popular belief, promote a more egalitarian distribution of web traffic by helping less popular sites gain visibility, balancing the dominance of popular pages.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence and theoretical analysis showing search engines have an egalitarian effect on web traffic distribution, challenging prior claims of bias towards popular sites.

Findings

Search engines mitigate the traffic bias towards popular sites.

Search behavior combined with search engine retrieval promotes less popular sites.

Empirical data supports the egalitarian effect of search engines.

Abstract

Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web.