Structuring the Infosphere Online: Web Search Engines as Protagonists of Content Moderation

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) is an open data space on the Internet. The number of websites accessible on the WWW is so vast that web search engines are essential as structuring and orientation tools for its use. However, content moderation does not occur only within social media; it has also long been practised in the context of web search engines, above all by Google as the dominant provider. This article analyses the process behind the creation of web search engine results pages—from the crawling of the WWW to the presentation of search results to the user—and identifies where automatic-algorithmic and manual content moderation are employed to improve the user experience. It emphasises that this not only creates technical biases but also deliberately influences the results of web searches from a political and corporate perspectives. Web search engines also play a special role due to their gatekeeping function with respect to the WWW, as they represent key nodes in the infosphere.