JASIST Special Issue Editorial: Re‐orienting search engine research in information science

Abstract

General web search engines constitute a fundamental part of today's information infrastructure. They have made it possible to find almost anything on the internet, usually by typing a few keywords into an empty search box, but increasingly also by voice recognition. In fact, search engines are now so integrated into devices and practices that they mostly go unnoticed. They have come to shape our lives as well as the society and culture we live in, and our lives and society also affect these information resources in their turn. We use them in school, for work, in planning our holidays, when searching for products and services and in politics-just to name a few important areas.Given the centrality of general web search engines in how and what we know, and in whose products, services and messages get noticed, it is no surprise that content providers are doing everything they can, using various types of search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM), to achieve the highest possible rank and thus visibility on search engine result pages (SERP). When we talk about the uses of search engines, it is important to remember that there are other users than the ones we usually think of. Besides so-called end users or searchers, those who want to be found (content producers) are also users of a search engine, but also there are also those who do not want to be found.The search engine landscape is dominated by a few corporations that have divided the global market more or less along geopolitical lines: broadly speaking, Baidu in China, Yandex in Russia and Google in much of the Western world. Microsoft's Bing is often mentioned as the most important competitor to Google, but this search engine has failed to gain significant market shares. In the United States, Bing has a market share of about 6%, and 3% in Europe (Statcounter, 2023). More competition between search engines is often called for, but this is extremely difficult to achieve within the current political and economic system.

Making the invisible visible: Critical discourse analysis as a tool for search engine research

“…The emergence of the web did not necessarily change these questions, but the explosion of information it brought, and the manners used by search engines to curate it, mean the answers are linked in ways, and at a scale, not seen previously. Calls for further critical approaches to search engine research reflect this and respond to the now-normalized reliance upon online search, and a market dominated by very few players with "very low quality thresholds" (Lewandowski et al, 2022). This information ecosystem means some additional questions relating to power are beginning to be raised in search engine research (e.g.…”