Related papers: Google's Hidden Empire
Web search data are a valuable source of business and economic information. Previous studies have utilized Google Trends web search data for economic forecasting. We expand this work by providing algorithms to combine and aggregate search…
Search engines play a crucial role as digital gatekeepers, shaping the visibility of Web and social media content through algorithmic curation. This study investigates how search engines like Google selectively promotes or suppresses…
We study the link between political influence and industrial concentration. We present a joint model of political influence and market competition: an oligopoly lobbies the government over regulation, and competes in the product market…
Search engines like Google have become major information gatekeepers that use artificial intelligence (AI) to determine who and what voters find when searching for political information. This article proposes and tests a framework of…
We perform a large-scale analysis of third-party trackers on the World Wide Web from more than 3.5 billion web pages of the CommonCrawl 2012 corpus. We extract a dataset containing more than 140 million third-party embeddings in over 41…
Social network analysis has long been an untiring topic of sociology. However, until the era of information technology, the availability of data, mainly collected by the traditional method of personal survey, was highly limited and…
Platform giants in China have operated with persistently compressed margins in highly concentrated markets for much of the past decade, despite market shares exceeding 60\% in core segments. Standard theory predicts otherwise: either the…
The power of digital platforms is at the center of major ongoing policy and regulatory efforts. To advance existing debates, we designed and executed an experiment to measure the performative power of online search providers. Instantiated…
The internet is a common place for businesses to collect and store as much client data as possible and computer storage capacity has increased exponentially due to this trend. Businesses utilize this data to enhance customer satisfaction,…
The online advertising market has recently reached the 500 billion dollar mark. To accommodate the need to match a user with the highest bidder at a fraction of a second, it has moved towards a complex, automated and often opaque model that…
A vast amount of data is created every minute, both in the private sector and industry. Whereas it is often easy to get hold of data in the private entertainment sector, in the industrial production environment it is much more difficult due…
Google Play's policy forbids the use of incentivized installs, ratings, and reviews to manipulate the placement of apps. However, there still exist apps that incentivize installs for other apps on the platform. To understand how…
Cloud computing is one of the latest emerging innovations of the modern internet and technological landscape. With everyone from the White house to major online technological leaders like Amazon and Google using or offering cloud computing…
Widespread e-commerce activity on the Internet has led to new opportunities to collect vast amounts of micro-level market and nonmarket data. In this paper we share our experiences in collecting, validating, storing and analyzing large…
High-quality online civic infrastructure is increasingly critical for the success of democratic processes. There is a pervasive reliance on search engines to find facts and information necessary for political participation and oversight. We…
The global aid system functions as a complex and evolving ecosystem; yet widespread understanding of its structure remains largely limited to aggregate volume flows. Here we map the network topology of global aid using a dataset of…
Since the dawn of human civilization, trust has been the core challenge of social organization. Trust functions to reduce the effort spent in constantly monitoring others' actions in order to verify their assertions, thus facilitating…
The last decades have been characterized by unprecedented technological advances, many of them powered by modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). The world has become more digitally connected than…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of global web usage patterns based on data from SimilarWeb, a leading source for estimating web traffic. Leveraging a dataset comprising over 250,000 websites, we estimate the total web traffic…
The Internet has not only digitized but also democratized information access across the globe. This gradual but path-breaking move to online information propagation has resulted in search engines playing an increasingly prominent role in…