Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, about 20 years after the first connection was established over what is today known as the Internet (WebFoundation.org). Over the years, people around the world have come to find the World Wide Web very useful, making it a widely used resource today, from posting information in the web to accessing and making use of that information. Search engines are a great example. They are software systems designed to search and obtain information from the World Wide Web.
The definition of a web search engine made by Halavais (2009, 5–6), is "an information retrieval system that allows for keyword searches of distributed digital text." Without a doubt, there is bias in search engines. Couvering, in her abstract describes this as "bias that invites users to click on links to large websites, commercial websites, websites based in certain countries, and websites written in certain languages." This paper focuses on the ethics and principles that have been long involved in search engines.
Most web or Internet users know about the importance of search engines. Many of us now depend on them to find various information relating to our daily activities, from sports to school to entertainment to work etc. It is the benefit of these search engines that has created arrays of ethical concerns. Search engine bias has been used to describe three distinct, albeit sometimes overlapping concerns: (1) search-engine technology is not neutral, but instead has embedded features in its design that favor some values over others; (2) major search engines systematically favor some sites (and some kinds of sites) over others in the lists of results they return in response to user search queries; and (3) search algorithms do not use objective criteria in generating their lists of results for search queries (Plato.stanford.edu).
Search engines should be neutral, impartial and produce results based on relevance.
Ethics and the Internet No one denies that the Internet is the most useful tool for research, business, and education, yet the Internet is the subject of a topic that is as controversial as the legalities of abortion or homosexual rights: ethics and the Internet. ... This brings a need for a case of ethics in the Internet realm. ...
Why Bother With Ethics? ... Purpose, principle and consequence are the vehicles of ethics in business. ... Ethics are a necessary and critical ingredient in any successful enterprise. ... Clearly, defining ethics is to define man 's values and interests. ... Constitution guarantees a "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." ...
Practically anything you could ever need to look up is provided online and can easily be found with the use of a search engine. ... The ethics of using the Internet can cause problems too. ... There is a site called 192.com where anybody can be searched for and find their full name, address and telephone number, even with clear directions to their house. ... Eventually it will be too hard to use search engines because it will just give you so many sites; far too many to sort through. ...
All that a person has to do is to type in an "indecent" word and modern search engines will point to sites where the word crops up. Typing in a popular for letter expletive into two of the most popular search engines yielded 17224 hits for Lycos and 40000 for AltaVista, the worlds biggest search engine. However both of these engines have over 60 million cataloged web pages. ... In the course of the debate, serious questions have been raised regarding the study's methodology, the ethics by which its data were gathered and even its true authorship. ...
Why Bother With Ethics? ... Purpose, principle and consequence are the vehicles of ethics in business. ... Ethics are a necessary and critical ingredient in any successful enterprise. ... Clearly, defining ethics is to define man 's values and interests. ... Constitution guarantees a "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." ...
As you sit down to watch your favorite television show at night do you notice that each actor or actress has a different personality? I watch many different shows and it seems to me that each person has their own personality. Personality is a unique set of stable, ordering characteristics and patterns of behavior that influence the way a person adjusts to the environment (Moist, 2003). I feel that each person in the world each has his or her own unique personality with different characteristics. Some of the characteristics that vary from person to person are things such as motives, thought...
