{"id":24405,"date":"2010-06-09T10:14:02","date_gmt":"2010-06-09T15:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=24405"},"modified":"2012-07-08T01:30:16","modified_gmt":"2012-07-08T06:30:16","slug":"information-is-power-bp-pays-google-to-get-the-upperhand-on-what-we-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2010\/06\/09\/information-is-power-bp-pays-google-to-get-the-upperhand-on-what-we-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Information is Power: BP Pays Google to Get the Upperhand on What We Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google searches are (as far as I know) purely a function of their algorithm.*\u00a0 A company, for example, is not supposed to be able to pay Google to increase its rank in the results.\u00a0 Google does, however, sell something on its search results page.\u00a0 If a company buys a search term, when a person searches for that term, Google will place a “sponsored link” at the top of its results page that is discreetly identified as advertising.\u00a0 See the upper right corner of the very gently shaded link that appears at the top of search results for the word “dell.”\u00a0 This is advertising purchased by Dell computers:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Keith Marsalek<\/a> at nola.com<\/a> alerted me to the fact that British Petroleum (BP) has bought a bunch of search terms and phrases such that, when one searches for information about the oil spill, the first thing that comes up is BP’s public relations website (selection below).\u00a0 They are hoping that internet users, whether they recognize that BP has bought the top slot or not, will read their version of events and, perhaps, only <\/em>their version of events.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Read nola.com’s oil spill page<\/a> instead.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: <\/strong><\/span> To clarify, I’m not suggesting that this is surprising or that BP is uniquely evil in doing this.\u00a0 I’m simply pointing out that money buys the power to shape the distribution of information.\u00a0 Many of you have commented that “sponsored links” are ads and just skip right over them.\u00a0 But others might not.\u00a0 The link and the shading is very subtle.\u00a0 Even if a person sees the phrase “sponsored link,” they might interpret it to mean that Google thinks it’s a good link, one they sponsored.\u00a0 Not everyone is a sophisticated consumer of the internet.\u00a0 And, even if they know it’s an ad, not everyone is as suspicious of ads, nor of companies, as some.\u00a0 So I think buying the ad will, in fact, make it so that more people will be exposed to BP’s version than otherwise.\u00a0 And that’s all I was trying to say.\u00a0 It’s just a simple example of the relationship between power and knowledge.<\/p>\n

* I know there is plenty of controversy over there algorithm as well.\u00a0 Feel free to discuss that in the comments.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Lisa Wade is a\u00a0professor of sociology at Occidental College<\/a>. You can follow her on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google searches are (as far as I know) purely a function of their algorithm.*\u00a0 A company, for example, is not supposed to be able to pay Google to increase its rank in the results.\u00a0 Google does, however, sell something on its search results page.\u00a0 If a company buys a search term, when a person searches […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[126,702,2123,2104,23703,140],"class_list":["post-24405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-disaster","tag-energy","tag-environmentnature","tag-knowledgeintelligence","tag-marketing","tag-internet"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24405"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24409,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24405\/revisions\/24409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}