We defer to search engines’ ranking of information so much that most people do not even check the second page of the search results. Even academic and scientific research relies on Google Scholar, PubMed, JSTOR, and similar specialized search engines-meaning not only we rely on search engines to access information but we also rely on them while creating further knowledge. 2 In addition to that, various searches are conducted on specialized search engines such as Amazon and YouTube. Every day over 7 billion searches are conducted on Google alone, 1 accounting for over 85% of all searches worldwide. They are our main mediator of information (CoE, 2018). Without them, it is impossible to navigate the massive amounts of information available in the digital world. In this short piece, I explain why this approach leads to unresolvable conflicts and thus ultimately a dead-end. Meanwhile, the mainstream public debate mostly ignored the hard ethical trade-offs, opting instead for a collection of commonly held principles and values such as accuracy, equality, efficiency, and democracy. The academic ethics debate has not (yet) converged to a widely-accepted resolution of this complex issue.
One such aspect is the search engine bias, an issue that encompasses ethical concerns about search engine rankings being value-laden, favoring certain results, and using non-objective criteria (Tavani, 2020). Ethical aspects of search engines are discussed at length in the academic discourse.
In our digitalized life, search engines function as the gatekeepers and the main interface for information.
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