Late 1998, and the World Wide Web, the once-great liberator of human ideas, is dead. Certainly, you can go to Yahoo or AltaVista or Excite or HotBot and do a search for whatever-you-call it. But increasingly, the major search engines have little desire to lead you away. They make all their money by keeping users on their sites -- so rather than maintain great search technology, they're letting their search engines stagnate and fall behind the growth and complexity of the Web. The fact that search engines generally suck now isn't important to the major portals: at this point they're selling brand, not search technology. You go to Yahoo or Excite for the brand, not because it's a great search engine. At this point, the portals know they can't make enough money just sending users off to other sites, so they deliberately undercut their search effectiveness (by slowing investment to a trickle). And so, the original promise of the Web, that anyone could publish original content, is marginalized: what good is a good idea if you can't find it? If someone writes a radical idea and publishes it on the Web, say from their Geocities home page, but the search engines never index it, what good is the idea? No one can read it! As the effectiveness of search engines drops off, the notion that the Web might serve as a platform for the radical and unheard voices in our society fades. There may be, in a short time, no way for average users to effectively search the Web, and voices of dissent will go unheard. Corporate America, in the form of billion-dollar search engine companies that act like the fine-oiled capitalist machines of old, is effectively silencing the radical non-commerical voices of the World Wide Web.