Rewriting the Past: How Search Engines Construct and Forget Time
by Iina Hellsten, Loet Leydesdorff, and Paul Wouters
New Media & Society (forthcoming)

Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information at the internet for specific periods of time. However, these Ôdate stampsÕ are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the Web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added, and the search engineÕs crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.

Thanks to beSpacific!

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