Seek and Ye Shall Find

This chapter proposes that search engines apply a verticalizing pressure on the WWW many-to-many information distribution model, forcing this to revert to a distributive model similar to that of the mass media. The argument for this starts with a critical descriptive examination of the history of search mechanisms for the Internet. Parallel to this there is a discussion of the increasing ties between the search engines and the advertising market. The chapter then presents questions concerning the concentration of traffic on the Web around a small number of search engines which are in the hands of an equally limited number of enterprises. This reality is accentuated by the confidence that users place in the search engine and by the ongoing acquisition of collaborative systems and smaller players by the large search engines. This scenario demonstrates the verticalizing pressure that the search engines apply to the majority of WWW users, that bring it back toward the mass distribution mode.