Informatics researchers throttle notion of search engine dominance

Search engines are not biased toward popular Web sites, and may even be egalitarian in the way they direct traffic, say Indiana University School of Informatics researchers. Their study, "Topical interests and the mitigation of search engine bias," in the Aug. 7-11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenges the view of a Web-dominating "Googlearchy" in which search engines like Google push all Web traffic to established, mainstream Web sites.