On the political economy of link-based web search

Web search engines arguably form the most popular data-driven systems in contemporary society. They wield a considerable power by functioning as gatekeepers of the Web. Since late 1990s, search engines have been dominated by the paradigm of link-based web search. In this paper, we critically analyse the Political Economy of the paradigm of link-based web search, drawing upon insights and methodologies from Critical Political Economy. We illustrate how link-based web search has led to phenomena that favour capital through long-term structural changes on the Web, and how it has led to accentuating unpaid digital labour and ecologically unsustainable practices, among several others. We show how contemporary observations on the degrading quality of link-based web search can be traced back to the internal contradic-tions with the paradigm, and how such socio-technical phenomena may lead to an eventual disutility of the link-based model. Our contribution is on enhancing the understanding of the Political Economy of link-based web search, and laying bare the phenomena at work, towards catalysing the search for alternative models of content organisation and search on the Web.