When such social media sites like YouTube, Bebo, MySpace etc. started to increase in popularity, cyber bullying flourished in the new environment. As more and more people started using such social media sites to chat, interact and share with others, bullies found a way to inflict misery in a way that seemed to have no repercussions.
Cyber bullying has come in the form of:
- Users uploading derogatory videos
- Violent comments on blogs
- Unpleasant or abusive messages on social networking sites
But what does this all have to do with search engines?
Well, many people might not know this, but search engines are the greatest data mining machines ever made by man. Google, Yahoo! and MSN all use powerful data mining techniques to find out which pages they should return for specific search terms - and why.
The technology behind it
Search engines such as Google send out spiders to crawl the internet and find all the web pages that populate their index. Every time a search engine spider is sent out to a web site and it encounters a change in the page e.g. the addition of new content like a photo or text entry, it will then save an electronic copy of the page and thereby create a record which will remain accessible. You can see an example of this by searching in Google or Yahoo! and clicking on the 'Cached' button next to the webpage provided.
How will this help stop cyber bullies in their tracks?
If a cyber bully logged onto a social networking site like Bebo, for example, and sent a victim a threatening message and later realised that they may get into trouble for bullying, they might decide to delete the message, or even (potentially) the entire site, in the hope that they were removing the evidence.
That's when search engines come riding to the rescue. Because it's possible for search engines to track back through the large amounts of data in the electronic copy downloaded and saved to their large indexes, they could use this ability to locate the cached abusive comments and report them to the authorities.
Unethical users who sign up for social networking sites with mischief on their minds should think twice about the electronic footprint they leave behind as, especially with search engines on our side, everything is traceable.
