On the Political Economy of Link-based Web Search
Deepak P, James Steinhoff, Stanley Simoes
TL;DR
The paper analyzes how the dominant link-based web search paradigm concentrates gatekeeping power and aligns with capital within a critical political economy framework. It develops a consequence-focused model separating first-order and second-order effects, including power inequality, link commodification, platformization, biases, and ecological costs. By tracing design choices, historical ideology, and labor dynamics, the work links historical bibliometrics to contemporary search governance and highlights the vulnerable incentives created by link-based ranking. The findings underscore the need for alternative models and governance that preserve information access, reduce ecological and social harms, and re-balance the incentives shaping search ecosystems.
Abstract
Web search engines arguably form the most popular data-driven systems in contemporary society. They wield a considerable power by functioning as gatekeepers of the Web, with most user journeys on the Web beginning with them. Starting from the late 1990s, search engines have been dominated by the paradigm of link-based web search. In this paper, we critically analyze the political economy of the paradigm of link-based web search, drawing upon insights and methodologies from critical political economy. We draw several insights on how link-based web search has led to phenomena that favor capital through long-term structural changes on the Web, and how it has led to accentuating unpaid digital labor and ecologically unsustainable practices, among several others. We show how contemporary observations on the degrading quality of link-based web search can be traced back to the internal contradictions with the paradigm, and how such socio-technical phenomena may lead to a disutility of the link-based web search model. Our contribution is primarily on enhancing the understanding of the political economy of link-based web search, and laying bare the phenomena at work, and implicitly catalyze the search for alternative models.