Foreword

As most of the students who has a computer one of my first move when I
wake up is to switch on the computer and to spend my first twenty minutes of the day
on the Internet.
From there I have a look at the last news, I check my e-mails and eventually
exchange some few words with a couple of friends by using online chat applications.
I also check my other email account as well as my blogs and analyze the traffic I got
during the last few days, to finish this process I consult my advertisement account to
see if I got some revenues. I often use as well search engine to look for information
which just came up into my mind during the night.
In the paragraph you just read was the description of my morning routine on
Internet. There is nothing special except that most of the moves I described above are
in fact done on two to three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.
I hardly ever use Yahoo or Microsoft for search purpose but Google is for
sure the website I visit the most to crawl the web but... is Google the Internet?
I got the idea to write about: « Risks of search engine dependency and its
influence on data quality » not because I was using all those Google applications
everyday and was scared about what will happen if I get in troubles with Google
such as privacy issues or if Google just closed. I just write about it because one day I
found Google results not accurate enough.
And from this observation a lot of questions came to my mind:
· Is it me who is not good enough at performing research on the Internet?
· Is it because no one wrote about the information I am looking for?
· Is it because the information is not on the first pages in Google that I have to
browse all the pages in order to find it?
· Is it because Google is not good enough?
· Is it because the information is hidden in some other documents such as PDF,
pictures, videos?
· Is it because I have to use another way to crawl the web and if yes how?
You see here how a simple observation can raise a lot of questions.
I hesitated a lot about writing on this topic, the main problem I got was that I
was not convinced that there is a potential risk of being search engine dependent. The
reason is that companies such as Google are working hard in order to fit Internet
users expectations and the vision we get is that they are doing a wonderful work. The
problem is that there could be a difference between perception and real facts and this
is exactly what I am eager to discover here.
Can we measure how huge is the gap between the information we were
looking for and the one of search engines as Google are providing us?
Search engines are set up to find information on the Internet, information
being the basis of any good decisions making we can then understand how important
and interesting it is to write on this topic.
I hope you will appreciate this reading as much as I did when making my
research.