Additional:
All language makes use of symbols. Words have symbolic meanings and emotional connotations in addition to the explicit meaning that they denote. Our information about the world is not WYSIWYG. We filter information through perceptions and cultural categories. According to the Canadian environmental magazine Elements, people who live in the Artic have 31 words for snow. The U. S. National Snow and Icd Data Center also has more than 31 snow terms in English. Most of us don't see that much difference in snow.
Plato objected to the use of writing in Phaedrus because it would have a negative impact on human memory; it removed the necessity for men to have to defend the truth and logic of what they said; and would allow information to fall into the wrong hands (he meant ideas that were too hard to grasp). [Full text of Phaedrus.]
Formal computerized information lacks some of the behavioral, symbolic, and tactile complexity of information based on real experience, as in the case of digital frogs for biology students to learn dissection from.
Search engines, like Google, [alternative] have become increasingly important to work and daily life in the U.S. Weather, music and other forms of entertainment, and celebrities in the news are the most frequently searched items. You can see this in real time at Dogpile's SearchSpy. Search by keyword is not the only way people find things. IBM's experimental Query By Image Content (QBIC) can be used to search the digital collection of Russia's Hermitage Museum. [demo in .mov format - login required]The different search engine companies interact, with Google emerging as the dominant search engine. Although searching is now free, the potential exists for a monopoly to acquire control over finding online information.
Webmasters can submit links to Google and other search engines. Although search engines used to charge for this service, by the summer of 2004 most had quit charging. However, they do sell
adwords.
A search using Mooter.com for "Bosch" shows the influence of paid ads on searching. Bosch is both an appliances and auto parts manufacturer and Hieronymus Bosch (a Renaissance painter) as shown in Mooter' cluster display:
Selecting the Hieronymus cluster results in a list beginning with three ads for Bosch appliances. 