Text 3
The winner takes all, as is widely supposed in computing circles. Indeed, geeks have coined a word, “Googlearchy”, for the way in which search engines encourage web traffic towards the most popular sites. The belief that search engines make popular websites even more fashionable, at the expense of other pages, is now being challenged by research.
The apparently magical ability of search engines such as Google to return relevant websites even when given the sketchiest of clues by the person entering a question relies on the use of mathematical recipes or algorithms(計(jì)算程序). Google works by analyzing the structure of the web itself. Each of its billions of pages can link to other pages and can also, in turn, be linked to by others. If a page is linked to many other pages, it is flagged up as being important. Furthermore, if the pages that link to this page are also important, then that page is even more likely to be important. The algorithm has been made increasingly complex over the years, to deter those who would manipulate their pages to appear higher in their rankings, but it remains at the heart of Google’s success.
Google is not alone in this. Many search engines take account of the number of links to a website when they return the results of a search. Because of this, there is a widespread belief among computer, social, and political scientists that search engines create a vicious circle that amplifies the dominance of established and already popular websites. Page returned by research engines are more likely to be discovered and consequently linked to by others.
Not so, according to a controversial new paper that has recently appeared on ArViv, an online collection of physics and related papers. In it, Santo Fortunato and his colleagues at Indiana University in America and Bielefeld University in Germany claim that search engines actually have an egalitarian effect that increases traffic to less popular sites.
The researchers developed a model that described two extreme cases. In the first, people browsed the web only by surfing random links. In the second, people only visited pages that were returned by search engines. The researchers then turned to the real world. To their amazement, they found that the relationship between the two did not lie between the extremes suggested by their model but somewhere completely different. It appears to show that the supposed bias in favor of popular pages is actually alleviated by the combination of search engines and people following random links.
31. What can we infer from the first three paragraphs?
[A] Mathematical methods help search engines become more popular.
[B] The web information seems to be dominated by Google alone.
[C] Sociologists argue that search engines alleviate the inequality of websites.
[D] The ability of search engines is dependent on using algorithms.
32. According to the text, the importance of a page is determined by
[A] controlling other pages. [B] the number of its links to other pages.
[C] using mathematical methods. [D] the structure of the web itself.
33. The foremost reason why Google is successful is no other than
[A] its magical ability. [B] its higher page rankings.
[C] complexity of its algorithms. [D] its heavy web traffic.
34. Santo Fortunato and his colleagues seem to suggest that
[A] fair effect is created by increasing traffic to less well known sites.
[B] popular websites are made more fashionable by search engines.
[C] the situation in favor of popular pages has become more serious.
[D] Popular pages are more likely to be discovered by random links.
35. The author seems to be mainly concerned with
[A] prejudice against less popular websites.
[B] equality of search engines.
[C] key to Google’s success.
[D] negative effects of search engines.
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