How search engines re-write the past

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Multiple Presents: How  <http://www.leydesdorff.net/searcheng/index.htm>
Search Engines Re-write the Past


New Media & Society (forthcoming)

 <http://www.leydesdorff.net/searcheng/searcheng.pdf> <pdf-version>

Iina Hellsten, Loet Leydesdorff, and Paul Wouters




Abstract


Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously.
The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages
with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older ones. Some
search engines can be used to search for information at the internet for
specific periods of time. However, these 'date stamps' are not determined by
the first occurrence of the pages in the Web, but by the last date at which
a page was updated or a new page was added, and the search engine's crawler
updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use
of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications
for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay
between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for
searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and
the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.



** apologies for cross-postings


  _____


Loet Leydesdorff
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681
loet at leydesdorff.net  <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> ;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/



The Challenge of  <http://www.upublish.com/books/leydesdorff-sci.htm>
Scientometrics; The  <http://www.upublish.com/books/leydesdorff.htm>
Self-Organization of the Knowledge-Based Society



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