Search engine coverage bias: evidence and possible causes

Abstract

Commercial search engines are now playing an increasingly important role in Web information dissemination and access. Of particular interest to business and national governments is whether the big engines have coverage biased towards the U.S. or other countries. In our study we tested for national biases in three major search engines and found significant differences in their coverage of commercial Web sites. The U.S. sites were much better covered than the others in the study: sites from China, Taiwan and Singapore. We then examined the possible technical causes of the differences and found that the language of a site does not affect its coverage by search engines. However, the visibility of a site, measured by the number of links to it, affects its chance to be covered by search engines. We conclude that the coverage bias does exist but this is due not to deliberate choices of the search engines but occurs as a natural result of cumulative advantage effects of U.S. sites on the Web. Nevertheless, the bias remains a cause for international concern.

Can alternative indicators overcome language biases in citation counts? A comparison of Spanish and UK research

“…These indicators have the potential of reveal non-scholarly types of impacts, such as educational (from course syllabi and PowerPoint presentations), commercial (from patent citations) and social impacts (from Wikipedia citations) or attention (from Twitter). Moreover, they have the potential to avoid the language biases of traditional citation indexes because (almost) all countries can publish freely on the web and there is no selection process that works against nonEnglish content (unless perhaps search engines are used to gather data: Vaughan and Thelwall 2004). 1 This is a post-print of an article to be published in the Journal Scientometrics © copyright 2016 Springer.…”

Digital Hegemonies: The Localness of Search Engine Results

“…The main activity of SEO consists of shaping and adapting web content to make it more visible on specific engines, reverse-engineering their algorithms. In this sense, content producers are influenced by the mediation of search engines as much as consumers; and biases in results have real effects (Vaughan & Thelwall, 2004).…”

Digital Publishing, Indexing, and Ethics: Implications in Civil and Hydraulic Engineering and Research

“…There is no substitute to smart thinking, innovation, and scholarship, nor are there easy ways to overcome linguistic and geographical boundaries. Presently, the digital materials are biased toward the American and English literature at the expense of other sources (Vaughan and Thelwall 2004). In the future, the digital literature may become biased toward simplified Chinese publications.…”