"People feel that the whole group" of online information sites "is marked for death," he said.
Google's corporate information sites appeared to have been hacked this morning.
The page also has links to many other spam-fighting information sites.
The aftershocks of the Nasdaq's April collapse, which had already shaken the E-commerce world, hit news and information sites.
Professor Bimber's research from the 2000 campaign showed that partisan sites had much bigger audiences than nonpartisan, general information sites.
And more recently, it expanded beyond search to place its text advertisements on news and information sites.
AvantGo, which can be downloaded at www.avantgo.com, has fresh offerings daily from popular news and information sites.
Many information sites that once charged subscribers (Slate.com comes to mind) have subsequently capitulated to dot-communism.
There are only two pure information sites in the Google top 26: Dictionary.com and IMDB.com.
"All publications and all news and information sites have a certain audience that they target," said Stephanie S. Abrutyn, a lawyer with the Tribune Company.
The audience for news and information sites grew 14.7percentt from July 2000 to last month, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, a research firm that measures online traffic.
