Search engine bias: the structuration of traffic on the World-Wide Web

Search engines are essential components of the World Wide Web; both commercially and in terms of everyday usage, their importance is hard to overstate. This thesis examines the question of why there is bias in search engine results – bias that invites users to click on links to large websites, commercial websites, websites based in certain countries, and websites written in certain languages. In this thesis, the historical development of the search engine industry is traced. Search engines first emerged as prototypical technological startups emanating from Silicon Valley, followed by the acquisition of search engine companies by major US media corporations and their development into portals. The subsequent development of pay-per-click advertising is central to the current industry structure, an oligarchy of virtually integrated companies managing networks of syndicated advertising and traffic distribution. The study also shows a global landscape in which search production is concentrated in and caters for large global advertising markets, leaving the rest of the world with patchy and uneven search results coverage. The analysis of interviews with senior search engine engineers indicates that issues of quality are addressed in terms of customer service and relevance in their discourse, while the analysis of documents, interviews with search marketers, and participant observation within a search engine marketing firm showed that producers and marketers had complex relationships that combine aspects of collaboration, competition, and indifference. The results of the study offer a basis for the synthesis of insights of the political economy of media and communication and the social studies of technology tradition, emphasising the importance of culture in constructing and maintaining both local structures and wider systems. In the case of search engines, the evidence indicates that the culture of the technological entrepreneur is very effective in creating a new megabusiness, but less successful in encouraging a debate on issues of the public good or public responsibility as they relate to the search engine industry

A FRAME ANALYSIS OF NGO LITERATURE ON INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN CHINA: THE CASE OF AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, AND REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS

ABSTRACT This thesis critically examines the way in which Amnesty International (AI), Human Rights Watch (HRW), and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) frame the issue of internet censorship in China. As three of the world’s leading non-governmental human rights organizations, how these NGOs frame this issue—i.e. what aspects they emphasize or neglect, whose actions they highlight or obscure, and what kinds of solutions they propose—can influence which institutions or actors might take up the issue, who will pay attention to it, and what kind of action is taken to address it. In order to investigate the respective framing strategies employed by these NGOs in their discussions about internet censorship in China, a content analysis involving both quantitative and qualitative research methods was conducted on relevant literature published by all three organizations between the years 2005 - 2010.1found that all three NGOs tended to emphasize certain issues, including internet blocking and filtering, cyber dissidents, and foreign corporate complicity, while ignoring other issues, including Chinese internet laws and regulations, government surveillance and propaganda, and the complicity of hardware and domestic internet companies. The collective lack of attention to these items is problematic insofar as it may influence how target audiences interpret and respond to the issue of internet censorship in China. Largely ignored by these organizations, the items listed above are therefore likely to remain ignored by other political actors, including governments and policymakers with the capacity to take action on this issue

Exploring online retailing strategies : case studies of leading firms in the U.S. and China

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 95-101).Online retailing has been a significant part of people's daily life. Research shows that 85% of internet users have purchased online. In China, with the increased penetration rate of internet and adoption of online payment, the online retailing is accounting for a larger percentage of overall retailing volume year by year. However, the lower barrier to entry of online retailing compared to traditional retailing makes the competition more intense than ever. In addition, several leading online retailing companies in the US experienced unprecedented obstacles when attempting to expand in China. This leaves an open question- what is the right strategy in online retailing? The objective of this thesis is to identify to best online retailing strategies in China by examining the online business environment of US and China and distilling current strategies of successful online retailing companies in both countries. The research has been based on case studies of leading online retailing companies. Four lenses, including operational excellence, customer intimacy, product leadership and platform leadership, have been used to explore the unique positions these companies have chosen, and the different set of activities they employed to achieve the positions.by Jian Chen.S.M

mARC: Memory by Association and Reinforcement of Contexts

This paper introduces the memory by Association and Reinforcement of Contexts (mARC). mARC is a novel data modeling technology rooted in the second quantization formulation of quantum mechanics. It is an all-purpose incremental and unsupervised data storage and retrieval system which can be applied to all types of signal or data, structured or unstructured, textual or not. mARC can be applied to a wide range of information clas-sification and retrieval problems like e-Discovery or contextual navigation. It can also for-mulated in the artificial life framework a.k.a Conway "Game Of Life" Theory. In contrast to Conway approach, the objects evolve in a massively multidimensional space. In order to start evaluating the potential of mARC we have built a mARC-based Internet search en-gine demonstrator with contextual functionality. We compare the behavior of the mARC demonstrator with Google search both in terms of performance and relevance. In the study we find that the mARC search engine demonstrator outperforms Google search by an order of magnitude in response time while providing more relevant results for some classes of queries

Unifying Antitrust Enforcement for the Digital Age

As the digital revolution continues to transform competition among businesses, U.S. antitrust enforcement has struggled to remain effective. The U.S. has long depended on a system of dual antitrust enforcement through both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ). Modern technology has greatly exacerbated existing structural deficiencies of the two-headed approach, at times resulting in deadlock. The two agencies approach new antitrust issues generated by computational technologies differently and fight over who should lead key investigations, leading to economic uncertainty in the most important business sectors. These enforcement disagreements can also hobble the government’s response to significant national security issues emerging from the interplay of technological competition among private companies and among nation states. Further, dual enforcement hinders government action in the newly critical area of data privacy: the agency responsible, the FTC, suffers a mission overload of enforcing both antitrust and privacy, which can work against each other. The best solution is for the DOJ to become the sole antitrust enforcement agency. First, antitrust decisions, especially in the technology arena, directly affect geopolitical competition and international relations, a province constitutionally assigned to the president. It therefore makes more sense for the DOJ, which, unlike the FTC, is controlled by the president, to direct antitrust enforcement as one piece of a larger foreign policy. Second, consolidating enforcement in the DOJ would also allow the FTC to concentrate on enforcing privacy law, free from its sometimes-conflicting antitrust mandate. Dual enforcement of antitrust law should yield to single agency enforcement, with the FTC enforcing privacy and the DOJ enforcing antitrust

Visual Articulation of Modernism: Self-portraiture in Colonial Korea, 1915-1932

From about 1914, Korean artists began painting on canvas using the Western medium of oil. This seemingly benign shift from ink on paper and silk to oil on canvas was pivotal in engendering Korean painting into the assured phase of artistic modernism. Prescribed conventions that had governed ink painting for over nine hundred years came to be supplanted within a few short years by a divergent artistic paradigm that centralized subjective identity and visually described the ambiguities of contemporary conditions. The training and production of these early works of art took place not in Korea but in Japan where most young male artists studied at the Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkô (Tokyo School of Fine Arts). Moreover, the emergence of Korean modern art was compounded by the socio-political tensions of 1910-45 Japanese colonial rule. It was within this contested space of not only subjugation but also integration that the painted self emerged. A selection of self-portraiture by Korean artists from 1915 to 1932 is examined in this thesis. The self-portraits serve as historical traces of multiple and fluid articulations embodying national longings and modern ideals in response to the dual forces of global modernity and Japanese colonialism. By integrating the methodological framework of colonial modernity utilized in the field of Korean history, but predominantly unaccounted for in Korean art history, this thesis argues the significance of colonial self-portraiture as a construct of Korean modern art