Abstract

Search engines are the most used type of offer in the internet. However, they have hardly been analyzed yet in communications sciences. Most of all, search engines have an orientation function but at the moment are also increasingly significant as stores of information. Thus, the market leader Google in 2004 made an agreement with five big libraries on digitalizing 15 millions of books and documents. Particularly in France this announcement provoked reaction, as they said that a cultural inequality was to be feared if predominantly literature in the English language was made accessible in this way.