Abstract: This essay details the search engine industry’s transformation into an advertising oligopoly. It discusses how librarians, educators, archivists, activists, and citizens, many of whom are the guardians of indispensable noncommercial websites and portals, can band together against a sea of advertising interests and powerful and increasingly overwhelming online marketing strategies.
From the body of the paper:
Google, Yahoo and MSN...are skewing the nature of all online information in favor of commercial enterprise, and will have enormous impact and power over the direction of information access and, indeed, democratic discourse, in the years to come....Despite the considerable implications of search engine commercialization for knowledge access, the topic has not gained much attention in academic and library spheres....If we want to go beyond a mainstream, commercialized, sponsored online information repository we need to turn to a different structure that offers a more inclusive, democratic information environment. As it turns out, there is hope (although it comes with acronyms that are a lot harder to remember than catchy commercial search engine names like Yahoo! and Google). Numerous computer scientists and digital librarians have been developing open source technology, such as the Open Access Initiative for Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI-PMH), iVia, and Data Fountains, that offer (and enhance) a user’s ability to search across multiple (that is, thousands of) subject gateways. These digital repository harvesting services imitate the functions and interface of a search engine, but they can be moulded to search in specific academic areas. In other words, one can create completely noncommercial searching environments that offer the scope and feel of a search engine.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/08/2005 04:34:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
