PassingNotes.com

…are search engines rewriting the past - reinventing history by presenting us with just a little bit of what matters about whatever might matter? if so, then do search engines have too much power over tomorrow’s past? (shit! that was the flakiest question i’ve put out ev-ah)…well, interestingly, there’s a big study that looks at precisely this issue, authored by the captious loet leysdesdorf (and co - they’re all seriously smart folks btw!)….what does the study suggest? well, for those of you who see a link like “read more” and roll your eyes like a 7th grader looking at weekend homework, here’s the skinny:

“Search engines are unreliable tools for data collection for research that aims to reconstruct the historical record. This unreliability is not caused by sudden instabilities of search engines. On the contrary, their operational stability in systematically updating the Internet is the cause. We show how both Google and Altavista systematically relocate the time stamp of Web documents in their databases from the more distant past into the present and the very recent past. They also delete documents. We show how this erodes the quality of information. The search engines continuously reconstruct competing presents that also extend to their perspectives on the past. This has major consequences for the use of search engine results in scholarly research, but gives us a view on the various presents and pasts living side by side in the Internet…In other words, search engines entertain a model of the Internet that evolves with the Internet. Under certain conditions such an evolution can become self–organizing. Unlike self–organization in biological systems, the historical traces of the development are overwritten by search engines to such an extent that they can only be retrieved artificially on the basis of a systematic research design…theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.”

so if you wanna read the whole thing and look at all of the interesting graphs and measurements, you can get the report in pdf or html formats online…and it also appears in html with some nice formatting at first monday (where it ran in summary form months ago)….

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