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ABSTRACT.
Search engines represent a very common interface for information retrieval out of the Internet. By querying a search engine, users provide information of personal nature. Software companies that own search engines become the owners of a very large amount of information which includes details about personal life of the users. Also, according to some software researchers, search engine results may be manipulated. This paper tries to highlight some aspects regarding ethical implication of search engine operation.
JEL codes: L86
Keywords: search engine; privacy; ethics; personal security
1. Introduction
Search engines represent powerful programs for selecting and filtering information, being difficult to imagine today's world without them. The act of surfing the Internet appears to be anonymous, but recent findings reveal that there are certain risks of disclosure of users' personal information. Analyzed by experts, search engines make use of different methods to collect information about users (cookies, search strings, IP addresses). So, why use search engines if these are threats to personal information security?
The Web has become a huge entity. According to Internet Live Statistics (Internet Live Stats-a, Internet Live Stats-b, 2015), the Internet has more than 3,000,000,000 users and there are more than 900,000 active sites.
The enormous amount of information that is available for a user makes search unpractical in the absence of a search engine. The initial purpose of the Web was to link unconnected information from various web pages and not to get information from other addresses than the ones introduced by the user.
Although the search engine is a very useful instrument for information retrieval, it follows the owner's policy. Thus, the companies that own the search engines are the target of numerous critics concerning the large amount of private information stored, as well as the opacity and restrictive policy of these companies.
2. Search Engine Technology
A search engine is a tool for searching information online. Search engines rely on automated programs called "spiders" (robots or crawlers) that browse the Web online by following links from one website to another. Search robots have custom names, so Google has the engine robot called "Googlebot" and Yahoo the engine robot called "Slurp".
Search robots collect and categorize information on each web page and then store the information in...