This literature review compares academic views of search engines from a variety of disciplines, progressively widening the breadth of issues considered to emphasise the importance of the wider social context of web searching. It surveys current concerns in each field and points out significant gaps in research, ranging from a lack of such basic information as the current amount of data available on the Internet to the lack of a significant corpus of political theory that covers the technical and social issues.
Length: 5000 words
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