Search Engines and Their Commercial Bias

How valuable are search engines for doing research?

Are they the best resources for academic information?

To test this premise, we’re going to do a search for the topic “obesity,” which is prevalent in the news and a highly controversial topic.

1 DESCRIPTION. Here’s what we find in the first thirty results from Google: numerous sites for obesity research organizations (e.g., Obesity Society, MedicineNet, WebMD) and many government-funded sites like the CDC and NIH. Here’s what we find in the top-rated results from Bing: numerous sponsored sites (e.g., the Scooter Store, Gastric Banding) and the same obesity research organizations.

2 ANALYSIS. A closer look at these results reveals a subtle but interesting pattern: All the sites listed in the top ten results (of both search engine result lists, and with the important exception of Wikipedia) offer loads of advice to help an individual lose weight (e.g., change eating habits, exercise, undergo surgery, take drugs). These “professional-looking” sites all frame obesity as a disease, a genetic disorder, or the result of personal inactivity. In other words, they put the blame squarely on the individual. But where is all the other research that links high obesity rates to social factors (e.g., constant streams of advertising for junk food, government subsidies of the giant corn syrup food sweetener industry, deceptive labeling practices)? These society-level views are not apparent in our Web searches.

3 INTERPRETATION. What does it mean that our searches are so biased? Consider this series of connections: Obesity research organizations manufacture drugs and promote surgery treatments to “cure” obese individuals. They seem to offer legitimate information about the “obesity disease,” but they are backed by big business, which is interested in selling more junk food (not taking social responsibility) and then promoting drugs to treat people’s obesity problems. These wealthy sites can pay for placement through Search Engine Optimizer firms (which work relentlessly to outsmart Google’s page-rank algorithm) and by promoting themselves through various marketing channels to ensure their popularity (Google ranks pages by popularity). With the exception of Wikipedia, which is so interlinked it usually ranks high in search engines, search results today are skewed toward big business. Money speaks.

4 EVALUATION. Commercial search engines have evolved to be much like the commercial mass media: They tend to reflect the corporate perspective that finances them. This does not bode well for the researcher, who is interested in many angles of a single issue. Controversy is at the heart of every important research question.

5 ENGAGEMENT. What to do? Start by including the word controversy next to the search term, as in “obesity and controversy.” Or learn about where alternative information sources exist on the Web. A search for “obesity” in the independent Web publications AlterNet, MediaChannel, Common Dreams, and Salon, for example, and nonprofit digital archives like ibiblio and INFOMINE, will offer countless other perspectives on the obesity epidemic. Let’s also not dismiss Wikipedia, a collaboratively built nonprofit encyclopedia that often lays out the controversies within a given research topic and can be a helpful launching pad for scholarly research. Good research does not mean clicking on the first link on a search engine list; it involves knowing that every topic has political, economic, and ideological biases, and looking for valuable and diverse perspectives.