Interactive Internet? Studying Mediated Interaction With Publicly Available Search Engines This study explores the use of freely available search engines to locate mediated interaction on the World Wide Web. We use the concepts of mediated interaction and quasi-interaction as developed by Thompson (Thompson, 1995) and Slevin (Slevin, 2000). We conclude that the publicly available search engines lack stability of results, that their behavior is not transparent, and that they do not present the results in a way that is suitable for the creation of data sets. The study confirms that the Internet and the World Wide Web can mainly be characterized as instantiations of mediated quasi-interaction rather than of mediated interaction. ... Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 8, No. 4 herekeywords By davidbrakein academicwith academicmediationsearchengine
