TY - JOUR AU - Gerhart, Susan PY - 2004/01/05 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Do Web search engines suppress controversy? JF - First Monday JA - FM VL - 9 IS - 1 SE - DO - 10.5210/fm.v9i1.1111 UR - https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1111 SP - AB - Do Web search engines suppress controversy? by Susan L. GerhartWeb behavior depends upon three interlocking communities: (1) authors whose Web pages link to other pages; (2) search engines indexing and ranking those pages; and (3) information seekers whose queries and surfing reward authors and support search engines. Systematic suppression of controversial topics would indicate a flaw in the Web’s ideology of openness and informativeness. This paper explores search engines’ bias by asking: Is a specific well–known controversy revealed in a simple search? Experimental topics include: distance learning, Albert Einstein, St. John’s Wort, female astronauts, and Belize. The experiments suggest simple queries tend to overly present the "sunny side" of these topics, with minimal controversy. A more "Objective Web" is analyzed where: (a) Web page authors adopt research citation practices; (b) search engines balance organizational and analytic content; and, (c) searchers practice more wary multi–searching. ER -