SCOLDS have long had a favorite complaint about the Internet: it’s one big echo chamber. By providing so much information, the Internet paradoxically has made it much easier to read only what you agree with — to inhabit a world where your own thoughts are repeated back to you.
RushmoreDrive, led by Johnny Taylor until it was closed this year, was a search engine shaped by data gathered from predominantly black ZIP codes.
A simple illustration of those fears can be found on a news aggregation site like the Drudge Report and in its treatment of global warming. Nothing seems to amuse its editors like a patch of cold weather during a global warming conference — and a quick search for “cold” in an archive of the site produces page after page of links to reports on “cold waves,” including one in Copenhagen last week. A search for “heat,” by contrast, finds very few pages.
Of course, these reports themselves are true. But the larger story has been distorted through filtering: indeed, the power of the press may best be glimpsed in what it doesn’t publish, rather than what it does.
Even so, the echo chamber, emphatically, is not the story of Internet. And there is a simple reason: search engines.
As they exist today, they are the opposite of an echo chamber — you go looking for something, and a cacophony comes back. The big players promise, even boast, about the number of pages scanned to provide the results for a search.
Search engines never became successfully specialized. There is no sizable conservative, black, Christian, gay, Jewish or upper-class search engine, which is certainly not true in nearly every other form of media — whether film or music, books or magazines.
It hasn’t been for lack of trying. There are many fringe “search engines” marketed to demographic groups — a favorite is cRANKy, “the first age-relevant search engine,” with a name that oddly takes a swipe at its intended audience. It also has larger type and a note on the bottom of the page directing a visitor to an affiliated obituary page.)
Many of the portals tailored to demographic groups are in fact directories, or scan mere slices of the Internet. In cRANKy’s case, members of a social network for people over 50 are said to do the ranking. Other niche search engines use tools supplied by Google or Yahoo that make it easy to create a “white list” of sites to search.
“I am a human algorithm,” said Steve Vidlund, who lives in Gwinn, in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and created the site GayCityUSA, which has a filtered search engine and news aggregation, among other services.
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Mr. Vidlund said he had been running the site for more than a decade and was motivated by his early experiences searching for gay topics on the big search engines. “Mostly the only thing I could find was porn,” he said. “When you typed in gay, all I got was porn.”
That has changed when you search in Google and other search engines, he conceded, but still he said there was a value in having the Internet curated by hand. “I am hoping they wouldn’t have to go to Google,” he said of his visitors. “I have already hand-picked all the links that are good.”
A rare well-financed effort to create a demographically tailored Internet search engine, RushmoreDrive, which was intended for black users, was closed this summer by its owner, the IAC/InterActive Corporation.
Unlike other efforts, RushmoreDrive crawled the entire Internet, and then applied what it learned from usage data collected from predominantly black ZIP codes. “We did not want to create a black search engine that crawled all things black, but wanted to crawl the entire Internet,” Johnny Taylor, the chief of RushmoreDrive, said in an interview.
The motivation, Mr. Taylor said, was general dissatisfaction with the initial results that a search produces.
“As it stands, you go to a Google, and you get everything,” he said. “Search engines are not crystal balls. They can’t guess what you are really looking for, and that is often colored by experience.”
Today, he stands by his view that search results are too catch-as-catch-can. Ideally, he said, users would answer an eHarmony-type survey that would allow search engines to create a perfect match in search results.
In interviews, officials at the large search engines universally agreed that demographic categories were too blunt a tool for making those improvements.
“Instead of sort of trying to do these crude classifications based on some demographic cut, I want to be the best at understanding your user intent,” said Satya Nadella, a senior vice president at Microsoft responsible for the Bing search engine.
Bing is introducing features that see search as a conversation and try to anticipate what’s on a user’s mind, offering prompts in a column on the left.
Marissa Mayer, a vice president at Google for search product, said that use of demographics in marketing only came about “because you didn’t have something more granular and specific.”
Because people are typing in their thoughts, she said, “you don’t need to use demographics to find out what they are searching about.” After all, she said, a 60-year-old white male typing in “Southwest Airlines” has a lot in common with a 24-year-old black woman making the same search request. Google recently announced that it would be using the last 180 days of search history, recorded by browsers as cookies, to personalize results.
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The one time that Google was tempted to tailor its results for a group was for a children’s search engine, Ms. Mayer said. The company passed on the idea.
“It was something appealing and fun,” she said. But then questions emerged, she said: “At what time does it taper off? At 12 or 16? And do you feel that you were duped, that we were hiding all kind of information from you?”
