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Multiple Presents: How Search Engines Re-write the Past

Hellsten, Iina and Leydesdorff, Loet and Wouters, Paul (2006) Multiple Presents: How Search Engines Re-write the Past.

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Abstract

To be published in New Media & Society, 8(6), 2006 (forthcoming). 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.

EPrint Type:Preprint
Keywords:search engines, internet, time, temporality
Subjects:World Wide Web
Information Retrieval
Informetrics
Science Technology Studies
ID Code:1505
Deposited On:22 September 2006
Alternative Locations:http://www.leydesdorff.net/searcheng/index.htm
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