Introduction

Library Trends, Spring, 2005 by Bettina Fabos

The Global Brand of the Year in 2003 title did not go to Coca-Cola, Nike, or Starbucks, some of the most ubiquitous commercial names in our midst. Instead, it went to Google, a highly used but lightly promoted search engine, which beat Apple for the second year in a row. The leading brand consultancy, Interbrand, had surveyed about 4,000 "branding professionals" who determined that the Google brand had made the most impact internationally (Google voted, 2004). To think of Google--the most popular searching tool on the Web--as a brand is important for this issue of Library Trends because it underscores how closely mainstream online information resources are tied to the commercial economy.

The Web has been a commercial medium since 1995, when the government quietly sold the Internet's backbone (previously controlled by the National Science Foundation) to private enterprise. Ten years ago we saw the beginning of a tremendous push--from the Clinton administration, Bill Gates, and the computer and telecommunication industries in general--to get schools and libraries wired. The push, it turns out, was not necessarily to bring the promised "universe of knowledge" (Clinton's words) to all young and "lifelong" learners alike. Instead, the push was a careful public relations strategy to build up a user base so that the Web could become a viable commercial advertising medium (Fabos, 2004). Indeed, the rhetoric and accompanying media campaign of the mid-1990s was successful: in just five short years, the Web (as part of the larger Internet) became a mass medium--faster than any communication medium before it.

Before 1998, search engine providers such as Alta Vista and Google were some of the most popular destinations on the Web. Beyond syndicating their services to search portals like Yahoo!, however, they generated low revenue because they were merely the stepping stones to other content--rich pages containing banner ads. That all changed in 1998, when the startup Goto.com began combining the impartial algorithmic searches from search engine providers (usually one of the top five: Alta Vista, All the Web, Google, Inktomi, or Teoma) with a database of advertisers, so that many searches, unbeknownst to users, became prioritized according to the highest advertising bidder. Suddenly there was money in search engines. Goto syndicated its services to all the leading search portals, with the rationale that most people search for commercial products anyway. Then the impartial search engine providers themselves began to skew their searches in favor of commercial enterprise. Except for Google, all search engine providers implemented paid inclusion practices: accepting flat fees for including a client's Web page in every search conducted.

In that year the Yahoo! portal, which had been syndicating Inktomi's and then Google's impartial search results, purchased Inktomi outright. Then the leading commercial search provider, Overture (formerly Goto), purchased Alta Vista and All the Web. And not long afterwards, Yahoo! purchased Overture, an acquisition that put three of the top search engine providers and the leading advertising index under one portal. And perhaps most significantly, Microsoft (by now regretting not getting into the search business sooner) tried to buy Google in 2003 but ended up building its own search engine provider, which was launched on the MSN site in February 2005 and will be bundled with Microsoft's next Windows operating system, "Project Longhorn," in 2006.

Search engines, once solely the online conduit for information, have taken on the contradictory role of conduit for online commerce. These days, even Google, the "ethical" search engine with the company motto "Don't Be Evil," is now focusing most of its attention on ad placement, either through its own search pages or through "contextual links" on other content pages (a practice that undermines the very integrity of its own PageRank algorithm). Indeed, the company's success in this vein is all too evident: Google sold $1 billion of advertising in the last three months of 2004 (Markoff & Ives, 2005). Reflecting on the company's motto after Google went public in 2004, a New York Times editorial stated: "Such idealistic talk out of Silicon Valley, so seemingly empowering back in 1999, seems embarrassingly naive now that the party's ended, at least for the rest of us" (Googling Google, 2004, p. 10). Such is the fate for all of us when Google the search engine became Google the brand.

This issue of Library Trends addresses Web content within the context of Internet commercialization and democracy. These are big ideas and problems, with potentially big solutions, so this issue has cast a wide net, pulling together voices from multiple disciplines, including communication studies, informatics, information management, research programming, computer science, engineering, and library science. I hope this issue highlights the need for and value of continuing interdisciplinary cooperation and cross-fertilization. We have so much to learn from each other.