Online Journalism blog has just posted a long review of Search Engine Society (Oct 2008) by Alexander Halavais. It’s an examination of the power and politics of search, published by the left-wing Polity Press…

“highly linked pages are likely to attract ever more links … leads to the ‘chunky’ nature of the web — in concrete terms the dominance of websites like those of the BBC and Guardian; a quality which, Halavais argues, Google’s PageRank technology ‘calcifies’.”

“Halavais introduces the blogger as a ‘search intellectual’, upsetting existing structures of authority on the web and acting as ‘a counterweight to the hegemonic culture of the search engines’ in bringing otherwise overlooked material into the ‘circle of reputation and links that search engines tend to enforce’.”