Voici un papier fondamental pour mieux comprendre le darwinisme documentaire et par conséquent l'économie du document. Une conclusion pour nous dont Roger avait déjà eu l'intuition : les moteurs relèvent plus de la bibliothéconomie que de l'édition.

The egalitarian effect of search engines Authors: Santo Fortunato, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Vespignani

Comments: 9 pages, 8 figures, 2 appendices Subj-class: Computers and Society; Information Retrieval; Physics and Society ACM-class: H.3.3; H.3.4; H.3.5; H.5.4; K.4.m

Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly surfing the Web.

Voir aussi des mêmes un billet résumant la problématique et les résultats.

Repéré par J. Battelle

Actu 23-11-2006 : un résumé en français