Querying the Internet as a mnemonic practice: how search engines mediate four types of past events in Russia

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei Zavadski ◽  
Florian Toepfl

In the digital memories literature, the practice of searching for information – one of the most frequent online activities worldwide – has received comparatively little attention. To fill the gap, this exploratory study asks how search engines affect the representations of the past that they produce in query results. Designed as a single revelatory case study, with a focus on Russia, this article delineates a typology of four types of memory events based on four types of websites dominating search results. For each type of event, we discuss recurring locations and mechanisms of power struggles over competing memory narratives. We conclude that within Russia’s authoritarian context, the mnemonic practice of Internet searching tends to reproduce and reinforce the dominant narratives supported by the ruling elites. Search engine companies are thus only one of several powerful institutions that constitute the social framework within which querying the Internet is pursued as a mnemonic practice. Others include mass media, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and online encyclopaedias.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 7063
Author(s):  
Esmaeel Rezaee ◽  
Ali Mohammad Saghiri ◽  
Agostino Forestiero

With the increasing growth of different types of data, search engines have become an essential tool on the Internet. Every day, billions of queries are run through few search engines with several privacy violations and monopoly problems. The blockchain, as a trending technology applied in various fields, including banking, IoT, education, etc., can be a beneficial alternative. Blockchain-based search engines, unlike monopolistic ones, do not have centralized controls. With a blockchain-based search system, no company can lay claims to user’s data or access search history and other related information. All these data will be encrypted and stored on a blockchain. Valuing users’ searches and paying them in return is another advantage of a blockchain-based search engine. Additionally, in smart environments, as a trending research field, blockchain-based search engines can provide context-aware and privacy-preserved search results. According to our research, few efforts have been made to develop blockchain use, which include studies generally in the early stages and few white papers. To the best of our knowledge, no research article has been published in this regard thus far. In this paper, a survey on blockchain-based search engines is provided. Additionally, we state that the blockchain is an essential paradigm for the search ecosystem by describing the advantages.


Author(s):  
Novario Jaya Perdana

The accuracy of search result using search engine depends on the keywords that are used. Lack of the information provided on the keywords can lead to reduced accuracy of the search result. This means searching information on the internet is a hard work. In this research, a software has been built to create document keywords sequences. The software uses Google Latent Semantic Distance which can extract relevant information from the document. The information is expressed in the form of specific words sequences which could be used as keyword recommendations in search engines. The result shows that the implementation of the method for creating document keyword recommendation achieved high accuracy and could finds the most relevant information in the top search results.


2012 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 60-70
Author(s):  
Melanie Radue

Everywhere in the media, people talk about the so-called “Twitter and Facebook revolution” in regard to the Green Revolution in Iran or other new social movements which demand democratization in their countries and use the Internet for communication and mobilization. Libertarian advocates of the Internet state that the Internet has democratizing effects because of its reputed egalitarian, open and free technological structure for communication processes. Especially in countries in which the media is under strict control by the government, these characteristics are emphasized as stimulation for political liberalization and democratization processes. This essay critically examines the alleged democratizing effect of the use of the Internet on the Malaysian society exemplified on the social movement Bersih. The Bersih movement demands free and fair elections in Malaysia, often described as an ethnocratic and “electoral authoritarian regime”. 141 The objective of this study is to demonstrate the dependency of such possible effects on context.


Author(s):  
Natasha Tusikov

This chapter explains how the transnational regime uses search engines (especially Google) and domain name registrars (specifically GoDaddy) to throttle access to infringing sites. It traces efforts by the U.S. and U.K. governments, along with rights holders, to pressure Google and GoDaddy into adopting the non-binding agreements. It then presents two case studies. The first discusses search engines’ regulation of search results linking to infringing sites and a non-binding agreement struck among search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) at the behest of the U.K. government. The second case study examines GoDaddy’s efforts to disable so-called illegal online pharmacies that operate in violation of U.S. federal and state laws. The chapter concludes that Internet firms’ practice of using chokepoints to dissuade access to targeted websites is highly problematic as legitimate websites are mistakenly targeted and sanctioned. Automated enforcement programs exacerbate this problem as they significantly increase the scale and speed of rights holders’ enforcement efforts without a corresponding increase in oversight.


Author(s):  
Ahmet Sarıtaş ◽  
Elif Esra Aydın

Today, using of the internet extended social media by individuals habitually enables both the business firms and politicians to reach their target mass at any time. In this context, internet has become a popular place recently where political communication and campaigns are realized by ensuring a new dimension to political campaigns. When we examine the posts and discussions in the social media, we can say that they are converted into open political sessions. As there are no censorship in such channels, individuals have a freedom to reach to any partial/impartial information and obtain transparent and fast feedback, and with this regard, political parties, leaders and candidates have a chance to be closer to electors. In this study, it is aimed to give information about the social media, present what medium has been used for election campaigns from the past until today and besides, by considering the effects of effective and efficient use of social media and new trends related to the internet by politicians, together with their applications in the world, to make suggestions about its situation and application in Turkey.


First Monday ◽  
2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Meiss ◽  
Filippo Menczer

Understanding the qualitative differences between the sets of results from different search engines can be a difficult task. How many links must you follow from each list before you can reach a conclusion? We describe a user interface that allows users to quickly identify the most significant differences in content between two lists of Web pages. We have implemented this interface in CenSEARCHip, a system for comparing the effects of censorship policies on search engines.


Organization ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane M. Rodgers ◽  
Jessica Petersen ◽  
Jill Sanderson

Alternative organizations have become increasingly of interest in organizational theory. Previously understudied, these organizations have also been ignored or forgotten in the dominant narratives and spaces of commemoration. This further limits what we know about the past and the potential of alternative organizations. To illustrate this problem, we offer a specific case study of the forgotten alternative organizations and marginalized space of a former Finntown alongside the commemorative narratives and practices of capitalist entrepreneur heritage spaces. Extending organization theory on memory and forgetting, we detail how commemoration not only tends to legitimate capitalist forms of organizing, but also excludes alternatives. Finntowns, with their emphasis on cooperative organizations and community, provide a unique opportunity for organization studies to explore commemoration and forgetting in terms of power relations, time, and space. These marginalized spaces contained alternative organizations coexisting and contrasting with dominant capitalist organizations. Remembering their contributions means taking alternative organizations seriously, acknowledging their historic importance as well as their ability to be models for contemporary organizations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-358
Author(s):  
Mariona Ferrer-Fons ◽  
Marta Rovira-Martínez

Abstract Learning about the past is becoming a complex issue due to the increasing need to ensure the approaches consider not only the facts, but also the implications for increasingly diverse future societies. This paper studies how experiential visits to memorial sites contribute to young people’s understanding of history from a wider and more inclusive perspective. The article presents a case study of two educational activities carried out at two memory sites related to the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) involving various qualitative techniques such as participant- and non-participant observation, expert interviews and focus groups with young people. The results show that an experiential approach to the past that works with emotions, empathy and dialogue with secondary students (17 years old) and older young people (15–25 years old) is a very effective means of offering a touching interpretation of the past and learning opportunity for youth, regardless of level of previous knowledge. Other findings show that the content needs to be reconsidered so new generations can interact with it. Young people’s worlds are shaped by cultural diversity, globalisation and the need to connect knowledge with the social environment, which enables them to engage in a critical re-appropriation of the past. This may be a new perspective that could be incorporated into the school curricula, and these types of visits could prove very useful for teachers and historical institutions such as museums or memorial sites interested in including young people’s experiences when planning their activities.


Author(s):  
Rotimi-Williams Bello ◽  
Firstman Noah Otobo

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique which helps search engines to find and rank one site over another in response to a search query. SEO thus helps site owners to get traffic from search engines. Although the basic principle of operation of all search engines is the same, the minor differences between them lead to major changes in results relevancy. Choosing the right keywords to optimize for is thus the first and most crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. In the context of SEO, keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a webpage is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. SEO is known for its contribution as a process that affects the online visibility of a website or a webpage in a web search engine's results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a website appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users; these visitors can then be converted into customers. It is the objective of this paper to re-present black hat SEO technique as an unprofessional but profitable method of converting website users to customers. Having studied and understood white hat SEO, black hat SEO, gray hat SEO, crawling, indexing, processing and retrieving methods used by search engines as a web software program or web based script to search for documents and files for keywords over the internet to return the list of results containing those keywords; it would be seen that proper application of SEO gives website a better user experience, SEO helps build brand awareness through high rankings, SEO helps circumvent competition, and SEO gives room for high increased return on investment.


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