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Abstract

The political economy of communication focuses critically on what structural issues in mass media - ownership, labour practices, professional ethics, and so on - mean for products of those mass media and thus for society more generally. In the case of new media, recent political economic studies have looked at the technical infrastructure of the Internet and also at Internet usage. However, political economic studies of internet content are only beginning. Recent studies on the phenomenology of the Web, that is, the way the Web is experienced from an individual user's perspective, highlight the centrality of the search engine to most users' experiences of the Web, particularly when they venture beyond familiar Web sites. Search engines are therefore an obvi ous place to begin the analysis of Web content. An important assumption of this chapter is that internet search engines are media businesses and that the tools developed in media studies can be profitably brought to bear on them. This focus on search engine as industry comes from the critical tradition of the political economy of communications in rejecting the notion that the market alone should be the arbiter of the structure of the media industry, as might be appropriate for other types of products.