Abstract
“Informational Society” is unceasingly discussed by all societies’ quadrants. Nevertheless, in spite of illustrating the most recent progress of western societies the complexity to characterize it is well-known. In such societal evolution the “leading role” goes to information, as a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept. Given such claim and the need for a multidimensional approach, the overall amount of information available online has reached an unparalleled level, and consequently search engines become exceptionally important. Search engines main stream literature has been debating the following perspectives: technology, user level of expertise and confidence, organizational impact, and just recently power issues. However, the trade-off between informational fluxes versus control has been disregarded. Chapter 27 discusses such gap, and for that, the overall structure of the chapter is: information, search engines, control and its dimensions, and exploit Google as a case study.