Databases and your view of the world

• SABRE and IMS were just the first of a huge number of databases which quickly found their way into every part of our lives
• The benefits of databases were immediate, profound and widely publicised, but one of their potentially harmful consequences was rather less publicised
• The designers of a database could make data more or less visible simply by changing how data was retrieved
• American Airlines modified SABRE to ensure it always listed American Airlines' flights ahead of other airlines


  Travel agents preferentially selected American Airlines even when other airlines were cheaper or faster because they perceived the first few results to be the 'best' for their customers
• The American government intervened to outlaw the practice which it regarded as anticompetitive and disadvantaging smaller airliners
• We should bear in mind that supposedly impartial databases could be used to favour certain data over others whenever we interact with services powered by databases
• We presume web search engines, price comparison websites, online travel agents and online stores rank results from best to worst, so we almost always choose one of the first options presented to us
• But have those results been manipulated to drive us towards certain results?
• 32% of people select the first search result and another 18% click the second link
• The tenth result gets just 2% of all clicks and later results are even less popular
• More than 95% of users only follow links on the first page of results
• Entire businesses are devoted to improving the 'search engine ranking' of their clients, a process known as search engine optimisation (SEO)
• SEO


  A method of increasing the ranking of a site in a list of search results, with the aim of improving the number of people visiting a link
• SEO


  • Using keywords that the search engine recognises as relevant to the site's purpose
  • Linking to other high-value sites and social media accounts
• Search engines prioritise pages that are frequently updated