Contents 4
Sufficient consensus
Search engine epistemology examines how search systems shape what people come to believe. Selection, ranking and presentation act as an epistemic authority that most users do not experience as one.
The field is small and its findings are stable.
If rank carried no weight, reordering the same results would leave votes where they were. It moved them, and most voters noticed nothing.
| Experiment with undecided voters | Increase in voters choosing the candidate ranked higher | Showed no awareness of the bias |
|---|---|---|
| San Diego, experiment 1 (102 voters) | 48.4 % | 75 % |
| San Diego, experiment 3, masked ranking (102 voters) | 36.7 % | 100 % |
| United States, online (2,100 voters) | 37.1 % | 91.4 % |
| India, 2014 Lok Sabha election (2,150 voters) | 10.6 % | 99.5 % |
Epstein, R. and Robertson, R. E., The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections, PNAS, 2015. Five randomised double-blind experiments with 4,556 undecided voters in the United States and India.
What the result pages leave out
These belong to the subject. People ask about them. They are missing from the agreed coverage.
- Agreement is not evidence. Sources that copy each other produce convergence, and convergence reads as confirmation.
- The fraction that is shown. Result pages display a small selection of what was indexed, which is itself a small selection of what exists.
- Commercial interest in the selection. The party presenting the results also sells placement in them, and that fact is absent from the interface.
- Belief formed by position. Rank is read as credibility, without anyone deciding to read it that way.
- The end of the search as the end of the subject. People stop when the results look alike, which they do long before a subject is covered.
What people actually want to know
- Who decided that these ten things are what I should see?
- Do these sources agree because they are right, or because they copied each other?
- What is on page four, and why is it there?
- What would I have to do to find out what is not here?
Search engine result pages can only display existing content. Treating that display as the state of a subject is the most common mistake on the web.