A recent scholarly paper called Multiple Presents: How Search Engines Re-write the Past is a good read for anyone interested in how technology changes society. It’s got more relevance for those working with document preservation, content management or search engines. The premise is that search engines can be considered the “clocks� of Internet time because their updating cycles regularly mark changes in the information on the Web. After studying and plotting how search engines update and display information, the authors concludes that search engines are re-writing our present (and past) by the way they record changes to their indexes.
Here’s the abstract:
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 ‘date stamps’ 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 engine’s 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.
We used to think that the Internet made time and distance irrelevant. These authors give us a way to bring time back into the equation. I wonder if google maps and GIS applications will make the Internet location sensitive.
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