Author(s):
Costa, Gonçalo Jorge Morais da 
; Silva, Nuno Sotero Alves da ; Pawlak, Piotr
Date: 2010
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/11144/356
Origin: Camões - Repositório Institucional da Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa
Subject(s): Information Society
Description
“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 this 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. So, our intention is to discuss 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.
