Curiosity Trumps E-popularity

Kurt Kleiner
Scientific American Mind - December2006/January 2007

What stops a few popular websites from dominating the global exchange of ideas on the internet? Human curiosity powered by search engines, researches say.
Visitors view and link to a few websites such as Yahoo, eBay and MySpace often, whereas most sites are hardly noticed. Some experts worry that search engines such as Google exaggerate this trend, because they rank search results partly by how popular a website already is. As a result, big sites could get ever more popular and small sites could grow relatively more obscure-an increasingly undemocratic result that that critics deride as a "Googlearchy".

But Filippo Menczer, who teaches cognitive and computer science at Indiana University found that this is not the way it works in the real world. His team studied database of search terms and webpage traffic and then created a mathematical model to explain the observed patterns. It turns out that even though search engines reward pages for being popular, they also boost traffic to remote sites.
Menczer's model suggests that this effect occurs because people use search engines when they are looking for very specific information. So a small site that closely matches their individual interests will beat out a match more popular site that does not.
"That's a piece of behavioral data that the previous model did not consider. If you do no consider it, you assume everybody thinks the same way; everybody's interested in the same things, but that's not the case," Menczer says.

For example, if you search Google for "windows", the first hit will be Microsoft Corporation, maker of the Windows operating system and one of the world's most popular websites. But if you search "double-hung windows", you will come up with the little known website for Iowa-Based Pella Corporation, which makes actual windows.

Menczer's model suggests that search engines introduce people to 20 percent of more websites than they would find if they were forced to simply to surf from site to site—as web users did in the old days before search engines.

The Marquise du Chatelet on Women's Education

The Marquise du Chatelet, circa 1735.

"I feel the full weight of the prejudice which so universally excludes us from the sciences; it is one of the contradictions in life that has always amazed me, seeing that the law allows us to determine the fate of great nations, but that there is no place we are trained to think. Let the reader ponder why, at no time in the course of so many centuries, a good tragedy, a good poem, a respected tale, a fine painting, a good book on physics has ever been produced by women. Why these creatures who's whose understanding appears in every way similar to that of men, seem to be stopped by some irresistible force, this side of barrier. Let the people give a reason, but until they do, women will have reason to protest against their education.

If I were a king, I would redress and abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, specially those of the mind. The new education would greatly benefit the human race. Women would be worth more and men would gain something new to emulate. I am convinced that either many women are unaware of their talents by reason of the fault in their education or that they bury them on account of prejudice for want of intellectual courage. My own experience confirms this. Chance made me acquainted with men of letters who extended the hand of friendship to me. I then began to believe that o was being with a mind."