Comment Re:Impact of Search Engines on Page Popularity (Score 1) 100
1.) The two results are not mutually incompatible if you keep in mind that they measure different things. The UCLA paper measures popularity by the number of links to a site while the Indiana paper measures web traffic to a site. While they may be correlated, they are different quantities.
Obscure websites may not have many other sites linking to them, but still get more traffic than what they otherwise would have if search engines did not exist.
2.) Web traffic is not zero-sum. By that I mean, it isn't similar to the situation where, if you are in the market for a digital camera, only one company actually gets your business at the expense of others. However, if you are researching digital cameras online, you will visit the google-page-one results, but you will also visit other sites.
Thus while the "rich get richer" on the web, the poor get richer too.
Zero-sum economics would apply, I guess, if you were measuring something like e-commerce transactions on websites. Coming up with a model for generating such traffic would be an interesting exercise.
Obscure websites may not have many other sites linking to them, but still get more traffic than what they otherwise would have if search engines did not exist.
2.) Web traffic is not zero-sum. By that I mean, it isn't similar to the situation where, if you are in the market for a digital camera, only one company actually gets your business at the expense of others. However, if you are researching digital cameras online, you will visit the google-page-one results, but you will also visit other sites.
Thus while the "rich get richer" on the web, the poor get richer too.
Zero-sum economics would apply, I guess, if you were measuring something like e-commerce transactions on websites. Coming up with a model for generating such traffic would be an interesting exercise.
