There is competition everywhere theses days and the internet is no exception. While it is convenient for consumers to have pretty much any sort of "product" available to them at a click of a button, it has made the number of "retailers" where one could now get the "product" infinite. This is not limited to only products, but knowledge as well.
Say you wanted to know the area of Mississippi but did not know it. You could go to the internet and find the answer using a search engine site. Some of the more common search engine sites are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Good Search, Ask, Dog Pile, Search, altavista, and AOL. However, all of these sites are non-affiliated with one another so they are quite competitive. Each time something is searched utilizing a search engine, the site is getting a kick back (another reason for the competition). So when a new search engines emerge (like when Microsoft introduced Bing in 2009) the more established search engines (like Google) that have already been seeing significant proceeds do not take kindly to the usurpers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9TCY3foqxI
In addition the clip demonstrated how easily assessable information is with the internet. The readings informed that once you type something in the search-box, then spiders search documents pulling up the best results. To demonstrate, I typed "monkey" into the search-box of Google, Bing, Altavist, and Good Search (my charity was THON!! FTK!!!) For the Google site I had 335,000,000 results, Bing and Good Search had 182,000,000 results, and Altavista had 177,000,000 results. The spiders on different search engine sites are more specific than others and often they will exclude articles to make the search more specific. With the entire World Wide Web now at our disposal it takes seconds to get millions of results but now the challenge becomes going through the information overload and trying to decipher what is good information from bad information.
