  However, Introna and Nissenbaum also describe what can be viewed as an “anti-democratic” aspect of contemporary search technology when they note that search engines “systematically exclude” certain Web sites, as well as “certain types of sites, ” over others. And Diaz (2008, 11) echoes this concern when he notes that that major search engine companies such as Google direct “hundreds of millions of users towards some content and not others, towards some sources and not others.” So, following Diaz (p. 15), we can ask whether the kinds of “independent voices and diverse viewpoints” that are essential for a democracy are capable of being “heard through the filter of search engines.”