In the search world, money decides who makes it to the top of search engine results and who remains buried amongst more than 4 billion of active websites.

If we take any highly competitive keyword, we’re going to see the same web traffic pattern: paid results at the top; followed by the results from the professionally optimized websites, news aggregators and news portals (reaching the 1st page of Google for a competitive keyword requires top dollar); truly amazing and informative websites that rank somewhat high, go afterwards; then the rest of the web content, stretching ad infinitum.

Most of the web content remains completely irrelevant and unseen by majority of web users, with the exception of some moving up the search totem pole thanks to its shareability on social networks, a favorable mention of a celebrity or similar random acts of digital gods.

This is not the best environment for academic research or any research, for that matter.