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Google and the Digital Divide The bias of online knowledge ELAD SEGEV Chandos Publishing Oxford • Cambridge • New Delhi Chandos Publishing TBAC Business Centre Avenue 4 Station Lane Witney Oxford OX28 4BN UK Tel: +44 (0) 1993 848726 Email: [email protected] www.chandospublishing.com Chandos Publishing is an imprint of Woodhead Publishing Limited Woodhead Publishing Limited Abington Hall Granta Park Great Abington Cambridge CB21 6AH UK www.woodheadpublishing.com First published in 2010 ISBN: 978 1 84334 565 7 © Elad Segev, 2010 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the Publishers. 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List of figures and tables Figures 2.1 Exclusion mechanisms 31 2.2 Interest conflicts within and between levels 34 3.1 The basic principles of page ranking 51 3.2 Google’s international offices 62 4.1 EPV index by country 91 4.2 VoU index by country 92 4.3 SoS index by country 93 4.4 Content vs. variety of searches 95 4.5 The trade-off between variety and specificity 97 4.6 Hierarchical cluster analysis 98 4.7 Trends of locality (percentage of local queries) 100 4.8 Locality by countries (percentage of local queries) 101 5.1 Frequency of occurrence of countries in Google World News 120 5.2 Frequency of occurrence of countries in Google News 121 5.3 Online news sources by country 122 5.4 Online news articles about Iraq 123 5.5 Online news articles about the USA 123 5.6 Online news articles about Israel 124 ix Google and the Digital Divide 5.7 Online news articles about Palestine 125 5.8 Online news articles about the UN 125 5.9 Online news articles about the EU 126 5.10 The centre of the international network 128 5.11 The international network of the UN 129 5.12 The international network of the EU 130 5.13 The international network of the UK 131 5.14 The international network of Iraq 132 5.15 The international network of China 133 5.16 The international network of Russia 133 5.17 The international network of Israel 135 5.18 The international network by language 138 6.1 Google Maps in New York 146 6.2 Google Maps in Benin City, Nigeria 147 6.3 Google RideFinder in New York 148 6.4 Thai air-force base in Korat 151 6.5 Iran’s nuclear plant in Natanz 151 6.6 The Dutch Ministry of Defence 152 6.7 AFCENT NATO HQ, Brunssum, the Netherlands 153 6.8 The US Naval Observatory 154 6.9 British headquarters in Basra before and after Google’s update 155 6.10 SAS headquarters in Credenhil 156 6.11 Uncensored overlay of the US Naval Observatory 157 6.12 The headquarters of the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment in Eniro 158 6.13 The headquarters of the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment in Google Maps 158 B.1 Search topics worldwide 187 B.2 Arts and business searches by country 188 x List of figures and tables Tables 4.1 Weight of economic and political value 87 4.2 A summary of index rankings 94 4.3 Correlation between the EPV and the VoU indices 95 4.4 Correlation between the VoU and the SoS indices 96 4.5 Summary of cluster analysis 99 4.6 Freedom level in 2005 103 5.1 Frequency of occurrence of countries in Google World News by language 136 A.1 Share of searches in the USA 181 A.2 Share of searches worldwide 182 A.3 Share of searches worldwide, April 2004 182 B.1 Countries appearing in the Google Zeitgeist report 184 B.2 Percentage of online users in the observed countries 185 B.3 Categories of search queries (first two levels) 186–7 B.4 Percentage of searches by countries 189 xi About the author Elad Segev is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer of media and communications at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and visiting lecturer at Tel Aviv University and Ben Gurion University in Israel. He dedicated his doctorate work at the Research Institute for Law, Politics and Justice at Keele University in England to the study of search engine biases and their social and political implications. He also publishes studies on online news biases, Americanisation, cultural diversity, the digital divide, and new applications and methodologies to utilise data-mining for new media research. The author may be contacted at: Elad Segev PO Box 4092 Zichron Yaaqov 30900 Israel E-mail: [email protected] xiii Acknowledgments I would like to convey my sincere gratitude and appreciation to Professor Costas Constantinou for his insightful intellectual comments and suggestions. A very special thank to Professor Menahem Blondheim who read the entire manuscript and provided a lot of support. Many thanks to Professor Niv Ahituv, Dr Elizabeth Carter and Professor Gadi Wolfsfeld, who provided tremendous assistance with improving the empirical chapters and offered some very useful suggestions. Many thanks to Professor John Vogler and the reflection group at Keele University for the intriguing ideas and scholarly atmosphere. Thanks to Dr Glyn Jones from Chandos Publishing for his useful suggestions and comments, and to Marion Lupu and John Tresman for their beautiful and careful proofreading of the entire manuscript. A very special dedication and thanks to Yuko Hori for her admirable patience, encouragement and support during the process of writing. This book would never have commenced without her. Thanks to Professor Robert Smith for his friendly company and academic inspiration. A warm thank you to my parents, who encouraged and supported my curiosity and eagerness to pursue knowledge from a very early age. Endless thanks to Regula Miesch who apart from linguistic comments and brilliant ideas, always gave me a lot of courage, love and a listening ear in the most critical moments. Finally, thanks to my charming little brothers and friends who kept on reminding me of the ‘other life’ beyond the book. I would like to dedicate this book to all these very dear people who made it possible. xv Preface Technologies are often developed in response to the agendas of powerful social actors. Initially, they shape themselves to the contours of custom; ultimately, they follow paths selected through struggles among groups seeking to turn technologies to their own interests. (DiMaggio et al., 2001: 327 on McGuire and Granovetter, 1998) One of the current concerns of socially informed studies of the internet is to understand the reasons for the so-called digital divide and to assess its implications for everyday life. In this sense, the internet, which is an almost unlimited and expanding information source, increasingly becomes a useful and powerful instrument for the acquisition of knowledge, and such knowledge brings social, political and economic advantages. When searching for information, people turn first, and increasingly only, to the internet (Hinman, 2005). This suggests that using the internet in general and search engines in particular can increase information opportunities but also information inequalities – something that should be carefully studied. As a field of research, the internet provides a rich site to study socio- technological practices, as well as to look at their power implications during the early stages of the diffusion and institutionalisation of a new medium. The internet is a unique medium as it combines a variety of methods and forms of communication, such as mutual interaction, broadcasting, self-searching for information, forum groups, human–computer interaction, and various types of content, e.g.