Introduction
The opportunity to 'seek, receive, and impart information and ideas' is recognized by the United Nations as a paramount value. Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) proceeds to stress that people should be able to practice this right 'through any media and regardless of frontiers.'(Ibid)
The right to access diverse and accurate information lies in the foundation of a healthy society; an informed citizen is a good citizen with an ability to perform his role as part of the democratic structure.
Many factors, most of which are beyond the scope of this essay, impinge on the way information is published and gathered in our 'information society'; access to technology and the Digital Divide , media ownership, and state and international regulation have a fundamental, and often detrimental, effect on the quality and quantity of information available for public access.
The World Wide Web is more often that not regarded as an innovation with radical implications on society (Holmes 1998); in the past 10 years, countless books and articles have been written about this medium's 'boundary bashing potential' (Poster 2001 p.173).
The emergence of the internet brought new hope and was hailed by many as a truly egalitarian medium that will offer an unprecedented amount of free information, and 'build a society and an economy of greater opportunity, greater freedom, and harmony.'(Feldman 2004) The World Wide Web is quickly becoming the major source of information for citizens in western democracies, and more slowly in other developing countries.
'Services that help users find their way to content of interest are crucial to the Web's ability to be a useful tool for people', and so 'As the amount of Web content skyrocketed, search engines became increasingly important in sifting through online material.'(Hargittai 2004)
As professor Julie Cohen from Georgetown University points out, the growing use of information technologies 'enables vendors of digital content to exert tighter control over access to and use of that content'(Cohen 2001). This also increases 'control over inputs to creation and communication -- and thus over social "meaning-making processes"' (Ibid.)
Safa Rashtchy, a senior research analyst at the American Investment Bank, USBPJ, predicts that the online search market, with current revenues of almost US $2 Billion per year, will reach $7 Billion by 2007, a growth rate of 35% per annum. (Rashtchy 2003)
Unlike other traditional and new media, search engines are often regarded as agenda-free tools that can be used to find almost everything. On the surface this assumption is not un-true; search engines apparently have no editors and, at least some of them, are still owned by fairly new companies that are not related to old and established media moguls or governments.
This essay aims to put under scrutiny the current leader of the growing search engine industry- Google , and examine the possible influence it has on the way information is accessed in our day and age. This also questions the World Wide Web's ability, with Google as its primary gatekeeper, to be a revolutionary, free and egalitarian source of information.
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