The World Wide Web is a closed & open system, simultaneously. While it transcends borders, it is, at the same time, full of invisible barriers — geographic, linguistic, cultural, political. This “influences” search engine results, for example.
So, when a person in India looks for God in Google, the results that are thrown up for him are different from someone who has keyed in the same search phrase in Japan.
Now, 2 researchers have launched a rather unique “search engine” called, “Search Atlas”. It is paired with visualizations that enable users to “see & cross these borders”.
So, given a query, Search Atlas displays multiple lists of Google results, highlighting distinctive words for each set of parameters. Then, it provides visualizations that juxtapose & cluster Google results across countries, revealing new information borders & regions that can vary widely depending on the query.
What are the developers trying to achieve? The answer is on the Search Atlas Website. The team of Rodrigo Ochigame, a PhD student at MIT & Katherine Ye, a Computer Science PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, says by exposing the partial perspective of a search engine, Search Atlas invites users to “experience the Internet from divergent positions”, & to reflect on how their Online lives are conditioned by technological infrastructures & geopolitical regimes.
Image credit: Search Atlas
