{"id":170,"date":"2006-06-27T12:12:49","date_gmt":"2006-06-27T16:12:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/2006\/06\/27\/power-of-search-engines-some-highligh"},"modified":"2006-12-10T05:25:20","modified_gmt":"2006-12-10T09:25:20","slug":"power-of-search-engines-some-highlights-of-berlin-workshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/2006\/06\/27\/power-of-search-engines-some-highlights-of-berlin-workshop\/","title":{"rendered":"Power of Search Engines: Some Highlights of Berlin Workshop"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve spent the past two days here in Berlin, attending an expert workshop<\/a> on the rising power of search engines organized by Professor Marcel Machill and hosted by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, and a public conference <\/a>on the same topic.<\/p>\n

I much enjoyed yesterday\u2019s presentations by a terrific group<\/a> of scholars and practitioners from various countries and with different backgrounds, ranging from informatics, journalism, economics, and education to law and policy. The extended abstracts of the presentations are available here<\/a>. I presented my recent paper on search engine law and policy<\/a>. Among the workshop\u2019s highlights (small selection only):<\/p>\n

* Wolfgang Schulz and Thomas Held (Hans Bredow Institute, Univ. of Hamburg) discussed the differences between search-based filtering in China versus search engine content regulation in Germany. In essence, Schulz and Held argued that procedural safeguards (including independent review), transparency, and the requirement that legal filtering presupposes that the respective piece of content is \u201cimmediately and directly harmful\u201d make the German system radically different from the Chinese censorship regime.<\/p>\n

* Dag Elgesem (Univ. of Bergen, Department of information science) made an interesting argument with regard to the question how we (as scholars) perceive users as online searchers. While the shift from passive consumers to active users has been debated in the context of the creation\/production of information, knowledge, and entertainment (one of my favorite topics, as many of you know), Dag argues that online searchers, too, have become \u201cactive users\u201d in Benkler\u2019s sense. In contrast, so Dag\u2019s argument, much of our search engine policy discussion has assumed a rather passive user who just types in a search term and uses what he gets in response to the query. Evidently, the question of the underlying conception of users in their role as online searchers is important because it impacts the analysis whether regulatory interventions are necessary or not (e.g. with regard to transparency, market power, and \u201cMeinungsmacht\u201d of search engines.)<\/p>\n

* Boris Rotenberg (DG Joint Research Center, European Commission, Sevilla) linked in an interesting way the question of the search engine user\u2019s privacy – as expression of informational autonomy – with the user\u2019s freedom of expression and information. He argues, in essence, that the increased use of personal data by search engine operators in the course of their attempts to personalize search might have a negative impact on freedom of information in at least three regards. First, extensive use of personal data may lead to user-side filtering (Republic.com scenario). Second, it might produce chilling effects by restricting \u201ccurious searches\u201d. Third, personalization tends to create strong ties to a particular (personalized) search engine, hindering the user to use alternative engines (\u201cstickiness\u201d-argument).<\/p>\n

* Benjamin Peters (Columbia University) used the Mohammed cartoon controversy to explore three questions: (1) As to what extent do search engines eliminate the role of traditional editors? (2) Do algorithms have any sort of in-built ethics? (Benjamin\u2019s answer, based on David Weinberger\u2019s notion of links as acts of generosity: yes, they have). (3) What are the elements of a \u201csearch engine democracy\u201d?<\/p>\n

* Dirk Lewandowski (Department of information science, Heinrich-Heine Univ.) provided a framework for assessing a search engine\u2019s quality. He argues that the traditional measurement \u201cprecision\u201d – as part of retrieval quality – is not a particularly useful criterion to evaluate and compare search engines\u2019 quality, because the major search engines produce almost the same score on the precision scale (as Dirk empirically demonstrated.) Dirk\u2019s current empirical research focuses on the search engine\u2019s index quality, incl. elements such as reach (e.g. geographic reach), size of the index, and actuality\/frequency of updates.<\/p>\n

* Nadine Schmidt-Maenz (Univ. of Karlsruhe, Institute for Decision Theory and Management Science) presented the tentative results of an empirical long-term study on search queries. Nadine and her team have automatically observed and analyzed the live tickers of three different search engines and clustered over 29 million search terms. The results are fascinating and the idea of topic detection, tracking, and \u2013 even more interestingly \u2013 topic prediction (!) highly relevant for the search engine industry, both from a technological and business perspective. From a different angle, we also discussed the potential impact of reliable topic forecasting on agenda-setting and journalism.<\/p>\n

* Ben Edelman (Department of Economics, Harvard Univ.) empirically demonstrated that search engines are at least in part responsible for the wide spread of spyware, viruses, pop-up ads, and spam, but that they have taken only limited steps to avoid sending users to hostile websites. He also offered potential solutions to the problems, including safety labeling of the individual search results by the search engine providers, and changes in the legal framework (liability rules) to create the right incentive structure for search engine operators to contribute to overall web safety.<\/p>\n

Lot\u2019s of food for thought. What I\u2019d like to explore in greater detail is Dag\u2019s argument that users as online searchers, too, have become highly (inter-)active, probably not only in the sense of active information retrievers, but increasingly also as active producers of information while being engaged in search activities (e.g. by reporting about search experiences, contributing to social search networks, etc.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve spent the past two days here in Berlin, attending an expert workshop on the rising power of search engines organized by Professor Marcel Machill and hosted by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, and a public conference on the same topic. I much enjoyed yesterday\u2019s presentations by a terrific group of scholars and practitioners from various […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1151,690,259,904,1182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e-compliance","category-fair-use","category-innovation","category-interet-governance","category-search"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ugasser\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}