The Internet revolution and Google have completely restructured information, giving more power to individuals in publishing their ideas on the Internet. Blogs, forums, Pod casts, groups, and personal pages have grown significantly, creating a plethora of individual written content. Our society has trusted Google as the industry leader in organizing all of the web’s information. Google utilizes a technology called PageRank that analyzes the hyperlinks between pages. Google states that it is a democratic system in which each page ‘votes’ for another page by linking to it. If a page ‘votes’ for two or more other pages, then its ‘vote’ is split equally amongst the pages it links to, treating each link as an equal fraction of a ‘vote.’ A page receiving many of these ‘votes’ receives a higher PageRank and thus has more ‘votes’ to pass onto the pages it links to. Google uses PageRank to sort its results, placing pages with higher PageRank above others. The technology also incorporates the content of links; assuming that a hyperlink will contain relevant information to the page it links to. Ultimately PageRank rewards already popular pages by displaying them first on Google, making them even more popular while ignoring unpopiular sites. Best-selling author Steven Johnson explains, “PageRank considers every link from one page to another… letting the amateurs have a vote. There are 40 million blogs out there… there has been an amazing shift toward a mass kind of media – a news democracy” (Link). Google has become a certain kind of democracy, allowing more people to express their work on the web. Unfortunately Google’s democracy also offers the web a biased, corrupt, and illogical democratic system.

Google’s PageRank system is susceptible to financial influences, allowing people to profit from rebalancing PageRank. Businesses have been increasingly relying on the Internet to make money. Most companies sell, market, and inform online, facing their brick-and-mortar competitors in this virtual arena. A good ranking on Google can make or break a website in a cutthroat virtual marketplace. Often times when Google adjusts their sorting algorithms companies report a loss in profits when their website is bumped off the first page of results. Due to such a reliance on Google, business must rely on Search Engine Optimization companies to increase ratings on search engines. These optimization companies are making a profit by shifting Google’s democracy and increasing their clients’ PageRanks, suggesting that money can buy power in Google’s government. Google itself is exploiting its own PageRank system for a profit. Google contains a ‘Google Enterprise Solutions’ page, listing useful enterprise corporations. However, Google charges $10,000 per year to be listed on this page. More interestingly, the pages listed here all have very high PageRanks and thus increased business. Are the companies purchasing these links interested in being in a directory, or are they paying for a guaranteed PageRank, putting them at the top of search results? Google maintains a standard allowing web page authors to block Google’s PageRank and ignore links in its PageRank computations. Interestingly enough Google opts not to use this standard on the Enterprise Directory, voluntarily giving these sites increased PageRank as an added incentive. The companies are most likely interested in the PageRank boost rather than being on a listing. This evidence reveals how Google is exploiting its own PageRank system like so many others to make a profit at democracy’s expense (Link).

In addition to financial corruption, controversial administration is also expected in a flawed democracy. PageRank has become so important that it is often the lifeblood of many companies. When changes in Google’s algorithms take place companies feel it, some experiencing devastating drops in search rankings and profits. These algorithm changes have caused many legal disputes, revealing companies’ heavy dependence on PageRank. SearchKing, a company representing text-based ads, sued Google for altering the PageRank technology and thus lowering SearchKing’s PageRank. Many other websites have complained or filed lawsuits against Google for lowering the PageRank of newly created sites, favoring already established web pages. These complaints reveal the power Google has and how it can affect the financial success of websites. Google is often changing its technology for unknown reasons; either to make the search results better or to shift power in rewarding long-standing sites over new, delicate sites (Link).

Some web authors do not let Google toy around with their lives and have formed ‘rebellions’ to use Google’s PageRank as an advantage for themselves. Google and other search engines complain about websites that establish “link farms,” a mutual linking network to increase all involved pages’ PageRanks, disrupting the search engine’s technology. For example a group of 100 participating web sites would have links to each other, creating a complete graph and a sharing their PageRank ‘votes’ within this network, mutually increasing their PageRanks. These groups interfere with Google and lower its accuracy. However it isn’t the link traders’ fault that Google ignores newly established and distant material. Such rebellious behavior is only a reaction to Google’s unfair methods of page sorting and poses a threat to Google’s methods of organizing information.

It seems as if Google represents almost every negative aspect of democracy. However the most important one has been overlooked: a lack of voter participation. Google claims to be democratic, and to be fair it gives each web developer an equal vote by analyzing hyperlinks equally. However an overwhelming majority of web users don’t contribute to the Internet and simply read it. In fact the people that do control the hyperlink structure are few in number and consist of a cultural niche of web developers; the contributors are not cross-sectional, as a true democracy should have. Therefore the authors of the Internet not only control the content on their pages, but also the hyperlink structure, determining what people will see. This system leaves out the opinions of Internet viewers, leaving them with no say in how PageRank works (Link).

Google’s democracy is nothing more than a way of letting web developers create and chose what the public should view, leaving ample room for financial corruption and deception of the PageRank system. The web has a long way to go in adapting to its viewers’ preferences by allowing small, unknown websites to grow without having to have thousands of hyperlinks from fellow web developers. It should be up to the web viewers to determine what they like, not the web developers as implemented by Google’s system. In a true Internet democracy both the readers and writers of content should freely control how they experience the Internet, something Google has yet to figure out.

-sps34