A new study questions the common assumption that search engines control the hierarchy of the Internet

posted by   prashant (209)   22 months ago (www.technologyreview.com)

“Conventional wisdom says that search engines are a fundamentally unfair technology — favoring the most popular sites and helping them to become even more popular. This assumption, captured in the term ‘Googlearchy,’ is now being challenged by researchers at Indiana University who have used real-life data to test it. Their results show that Web-surfing behavior isn’t as influenced by search-engine rankings as was previously thought.”