nisaacson@sociology.rutgers.edu wrote:

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Perhaps the list can give me some suggestions for discovering more about the politics and ideological approaches of specific search engines...

Quentin followed:

I think that Google uses a number of approaches that come from the recommender systems literature (and associated patents). In regards to incoming links. This strikes me as a particular social perspective as does social / collaborative filtering in general.

There was an interesting article recently in salon.com about blogging distorting google. The author argued that bloggers tend to link to one another's sites significantly more than normal, so blog sites are more likely to have lots of links to them than other kinds of web pages. Since google ranks your hits at least in part by how many other pages link to a site, the argument is that blogs are likely to show up much higher in the search results than other pages, with the possible social consequence of granting bloggers increased prominence/credibility in public discourse. ________________________________________________________ Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas 102 Bailey, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org