European Search? How to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search with European search engine projects

Mager, Astrid

doi:10.1177/20539517231163173

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 59 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Moreover, search engines with a social cause have been created that piggyback on well-established search indexes and search results such as the “green” search engine Ecosia, meta-search engines of various sorts, or privacy-friendly search engines (Mager, 2014b). This aspect is explored further in the present special issue, in particular the manner in which European search engine providers counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search through alternative search engine projects (Mager, 2023).…”

Section: Tracing European Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This special issue collects five original research articles (Haider and Rödl, 2023; Mager, 2023; Norocel and Lewandowski, 2023; Ridgway, 2023; Rogers, 2023) and two invited commentaries (Graham, 2023; Rieder, 2022), all of which are devoted to the state of Google critique and intervention by engaging critically with its study as well as prospecting for alternatives. Three contributions focus on search engine bias and discrimination in the context of right-wing extremism (Norocel and Lewandowski, 2023), Google Autocomplete (Graham, 2023), and content moderation (Rogers, 2023).…”

Section: Contemporary Google Studies: Special Issue Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another three tackle the commercial dynamics of Google, tracing its roots to the first description by Brin and Page (1998) of their PageRank algorithm (Ridgway, 2023), embedding it in the political economy of “technical systems” (Rieder, 2022) and relating it to how search engines contribute to the creation of ignorance (Haider and Rödel, 2023). Finally, the last contribution analyzes how to step beyond big tech and create alternative search engines and infrastructures in particular in the European context (Mager, 2023).…”

Section: Contemporary Google Studies: Special Issue Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Last but not least, Astrid Mager (2023) zooms in on the European context and studies how European search engine projects have attempted to counter-imagine and counteract Google's hegemonic position. Mager examines how developers of alternative search engines to Google have construed counter-imaginaries of search engines centered around social values, thereby competing with the corporate imaginaries centered on mere profit maximization.…”

Section: Contemporary Google Studies: Special Issue Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Advancing search engine studies: The evolution of Google critique and intervention

2023

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this piece, which frames the special issue, “The State of Google Critique and Intervention,” we provide an overview of research focusing on Google as an object of critical study, fleshing out the European interventions that actively attempt to address its dominance. The article begins by mapping out key areas of articulating a Google critique, from the initial focus on ranking and profiling to the subsequent scrutiny of user exploitation and competitive imbalance. As such, it situates the contributions to this special issue concerning search engine bias and discrimination, the ethics of Google Autocomplete, Google's content moderation, the commodification of engine audiences and the political economy of technical systems in a broader history of Google criticism. It then proceeds to contextualize the European developments that put forward alternatives and draws attention to legislative efforts to curb the influence of big tech. We conclude by identifying a few avenues for continued critical study, such as Google's infrastructural bundling of generative artificial intelligence with existing products, to emphasize the importance of intervention in the future.

show abstract

Section: Tracing European Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contemporary Google Studies: Special Issue Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contemporary Google Studies: Special Issue Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contemporary Google Studies: Special Issue Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Advancing search engine studies: The evolution of Google critique and intervention

2023

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…More recently, studies of online ad trackers have been used in understanding dynamics of online mis- and disinformation (Gray et al, 2020). Considering the recent efforts to repurpose search engines in order to study source hierarchies or issue commitment (Mager et al 2023), or the efforts to repurpose web archives for historiographical research (Ben-David and Amram, 2018; Rogers, 2017), we believe that digital marketing warrants similar attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital marketing as digital methods: Repurposing Google Ads for controversy mapping

Coromina,

Tsinovoi,

Munk

2023

Big Data & Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Digital advertising is central to the business models and technological affordances of digital platforms, creating marketplaces for user attention. Despite the keen theoretical attention to the commodification of audiences in critical new media and data studies, there has been little exploration of how digital marketing can also be understood as a methodological lens to study both controversies and the practices involved in the commodification of attention around the issues that animate such controversies. Addressing this gap in knowledge by drawing on the digital methods approach, this article proposes repurposing the tools, data and practices of digital marketing – what we coin digital marketing epistemology – as new methodological points of observation in controversy mapping. Focusing empirically on Google Ads, we scrutinize the building blocks of advertising campaigns on the platform and their metrics and measurements. We then offer a set of methodological ‘recipes’ for repurposing the Google Ads platform for controversy mapping and illustrate through a series of data sprints how this can contribute not only to a better understanding of the measurement and valuation practices that are involved in converting attention into a tradable asset but also the role these practices play in the unfolding of techno-social controversies.

show abstract

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

Lewandowski,

Haider,

Sundin

2023

Asso for Info Science & Tech

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

European Search? How to counter-imagine and counteract hegemonic search with European search engine projects

Cited by 7 publications

References 59 publications

Advancing search engine studies: The evolution of Google critique and intervention

Advancing search engine studies: The evolution of Google critique and intervention

Digital marketing as digital methods: Repurposing Google Ads for controversy mapping

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

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About