  Thus far, issues from the perspectives of business ethics and professional responsibility have not been directly addressed in this entry; our main focus in Section 3 has been on the kinds of moral impacts that search engines have for ordinary users, especially with respect to privacy, surveillance, and freedom. In Section 3.1, however, we hinted that search engine companies (SECs) might be held morally accountable for their practices involving bias in the ranking of search results. And in concluding Section 3.4, we briefly entertained the notion that major SECs might be held accountable for policies and practices that either favor or directly support censorship. In this section, we consider whether SECs have any special social responsibilities and moral obligations because of their “privileged place” in our society. We begin by briefly describing a key societal role that search engines play in providing access to information and knowledge.