Web Browsers and Search Engines
Web Browsers
Web browsers are the platforms you use to connect to the Web. It is not a search engine, though the two are often confused. A browser allows a user's device to connect to a website and see web pages. According to Wikipedia, As of March 2019, more than 4.3 billion people use a browser, which is about 55% of the world’s population. Most users connect to the Web through browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Edge. Other browsers do exist, however, and include Opera, Vivaldi, and Tor. These browsers claim to afford users more privacy and security in their web browsing, usually because they do not track a user's activity1.Search Engines
A web search engine or internet search engine such as Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go, and Yahoo! Search among others, is software used by the browser that searches the World Wide Web for information specified in a web search query (what you type into a search box).Search results are gathered from around the Web by way of an algorithm (a set of "instructions" in the engine software which, although programmed by humans, runs independently of human involvement). Depending on the search terms and the search engine, the results may be a mix of links to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers, and other types of files that are accessible online. Simply put, a search engine is a website, accessible through a browser, that finds, retrieves, and stores searchable data about other websites.
Search Engine Bias
Whenever you do a web search, you should never assume that the results you get reflect everything available on the web related to your query.Most commercial browsers and search engines, like Chrome and Google, track and store users' prior and current web activity, and customize the search results based on this information. This provides information that will be most relevant to users—at least, according to a user's stored data—in a convenient way, and these results generally appear higher in the list. Companies and organizations may pay the company that owns the browser to show up higher in search results, or they may employ what is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on their own websites to ensure that their company or products appear at or near the top of the list of search results. With most browsers, what comes up first is determined not only by your search query, but by SEO strategies, stored user data, and the number of times a given website has been visited in the past by a user or other users that, based on similar search habits, fit that user's profile. In other words, popular websites are more likely to show up first.
When it comes to news and other topical information in a search, this can create what has been called a filter bubble, in which the information displayed may reflect that user's existing interests and viewpoints. In other words, it is less likely that a user will readily encounter a diversity of perspectives without going deeper into the results or rephrasing the query 2.
Your Turn to Search
The following pages provide opportunities to explore the Web with different search engines. Pick a topic and search for it using each of the search engines.
- Are the results different?
- How would you describe the results returned by the different search engines?
- Why do you think these search engines returned the particular results you received?
In pairs or a small group, use the same search query on different devices in at least two of the search engines.
- Are the results different?
- How are they different, and why do you think you may have received different results with the same query?
1 Adapted from "Web browser," Wikipedia.
2 Adapted from "Web search engine," Wikipedia.
