Worrisome Rich-Get-Richer? Not the True Story!

Search engines have become efficient assistants for people to access information on the Web. Some researchers argue that the prevalence of search engines is setting a tough journey for new pages to become popular even if they are of high quality. However, the evolution of popularity on the Web is not a closed feedback process, and the flexibility of query mechanism of search engines provides a free interface for users to search whatever they are interested in. We show that the diversity and drift of users´ interests actually alleviate the rich-get-richer phenomenon which the popularity-based ranking strategy of search engines tends to make worrisome. The results of our experiments on the query log of a real search engine also confirm our point of view.