Sunday, November 20th, 2005, 6:33 am
Search Engines Play Fair?
A new study contends that, in contrast to the widely-held view, search engines give a chance to new businesses and sites. Traffic tends to be centralised in the ‘high-status arena’, so the study offers a rare contradiction.
A paper questions whether search engines make popular sites more so
THE winner takes all, it is widely supposed in computing circles. Indeed, geeks have coined a word, “Googlearchy”, for the way in which search engines encourage web traffic towards the most popular sites. The belief that search engines make popular websites ever more popular, at the expense of other pages, is now being challenged by research.