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The Need For Search Neutrality
wilsone8 writes "The New York Times includes an op-ed today arguing for Search Neutrality: 'Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's new Bing have become the Internet's gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include search neutrality: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.'"
Inability to explain why. Credibility of your article nullified. Samzenpus is trolling.
Google, a company based in America, has an autocomplete-style guessing algorithm which showed "Michelle Obama monkey" as the first choice when one typed in "michelle". It was so fair that they had to alter their own results and provide a disclaimer for the sake of political correctness. Apparently that wasn't even the first time they'd dealt with that situation. I'd say Google is fair until assholes like article author started bitching and moaning.
Try teaming up with Metacrawler, they are many times as powerful as google.
Yeah, Toyota also borrowed the wheel from somebody. It's only a matter of time until they're sued in the East district of Texas.
I dunno, will you tell me exactly why you feel you've been shortchanged by Google?
But now it's too late, my plan worked perfectly five years ago!!
...the mouthpiece for the State clamoring for MORE State control.
Shocking.
And PS, keep the goddamned Feds out of search.
This is my sig.
China will love this idea.
Let's go ahead and regulate the living crap out of everything online... that's sure to do wonders for innovation.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
The principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.
The definition of comprehensive depends on the computational resources of the provider.
The definition of impartiality depends on the morality of the observer.
The definition of relevance depends on entirely subjective criteron.
You can't legislate these things. They're intangible. And besides, Google (and many other search engines) rely on the ability to edit their results to defeat attempts to game the algorithms they use. Legislation that limits that would ironically worsen the very attribute it is attempting to improve! It would allow search engine spammers free reign. The solution here is not to regulate... If a search engine sucks, it'll be replaced by a vendor that offers an alternative that sucks less. But if you must legislate, I would take a minimalist approach -- only regulate that which is proven harmful.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
...talking about "comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance."?
Barf.
Encarta, possibly the most successful commercial digital encyclopedia of all time is based on the old Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia which unfortunately was subpar to Brittanica and World Book by miles.
Microsoft took that shoddy encyclopedia, added content, added media, added hyperlinks, and turned the paper volumes into the best digital encyclopedia you could (at that time) buy.
But facts are facts. You can't really alter the information of an encyclopedia without someone calling you on it. In the same way, search engines categorize and comb through volumes of information and return data as best it can. Sometimes that data is useless (spam), but other times it is very pertinent (vanity searches).
If Google or Bing can't restrict what is shown in their search results, the value of the search tool is reduced. As we have seen in recent years, Google's search results are getting worse and worse, being flooded by spammers and expertsexchange links that include a couple of search terms but either have nothing to do with the search or require registration to access.
Leave the right to determine what they will return to the search providers. Guarantee that the tool remains useful by allowing them to cull the results responsibly.
I use Start Page.
... and in exchange, they deserve that we regulate the fuck out of them to just sell us the bits.
Google's search is a free service with multiple competitors and negligible customer lock-in. See the difference?
If "relevance" is a requirement, then the government will have to produce a definition of "relevance." Wow, I love this idea. Instead of allowing the advancement of technology, we have to conform to a government definition, and if we rank our search results contrary to that definition, our search engine is ILLEGAL. And I'm sure the government won't abuse their ability to declare certain results orderings to be illegal.
Stay the hell away from my search engines. If I'm not happy with the one I'm using, I'll switch to another.
As Techdirt stated, this story was: Vetted By Malnourished Monkeys. Apparently the same this happened here. Yay.
Shh.
Here, there's this thing called the First Amendment. You may have heard of it. This is nothing more than some dingbat whose business it isn't to insert his nose where it don't belong. Once you accept his premise, spammers can also force changes in Google etc. rankings based on their own notion of "relevance". ("see? We have tons of this keyword in our page. We MUST be relevant!")
Dog is my co-pilot.
What are the options?
1. His site just never had enough incoming links to raise it in the rankings.
2. His site employed tricks to artificially raise its ranking and was penalized for this.
3. Google marked down his site for other reasons (competitive?)
Really, what is the most likely answer? For yet another price comparison website?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Broadcast spectrum even more so.
The FCC's original mandate was to govern allocation of broadcast spectrum; the naturally monopolistic tendencies of wired infrastructure (the need for eminent domain to build it, mostly) provides a reasonable justification for extending its purview to that as well.
But search engines are not natural monopolies. Anyone can come along, do it better than the other guys, and run off with their lunch money, so to speak. Just like Google did to all the search engines that they put out of business or pushed to the sidelines when they debuted. Sure, overturning a very popular brand like Google in the minds of users will be difficult, but that's mostly because Google is good enough for most people; if it sucked, people would be happy to try something new, and if a competitor search engine can't even carve out a little niche for itself to compete in, it obviously has nothing of significant benefit to offer.
And unlike the inevitable Microsoft comparison, switching away from Google to another search engine costs the users absolutely nothing, compared to not only the cost of acquiring an alternative operating system, but of learning it and changing over almost all of your apps which depend on it. If switching from Windows to Linux or OSX or BSD or what have you were as cheap and easy as switching from Google to Yahoo or vice versa, I suspect MS wouldn't have nearly the stranglehold it has on the operating system market.
Point being, there's absolutely no need to regulate search engines, because this is about one of the clearest examples of where the free market can handle itself best.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
There's a good debunking of the article here
Secondly
Lastly, there is NOTHING wrong with a biased search engine as long as the people using it understand the bias. Business, environmental, left wing, right wing, socialist, communist, capitalist and what-ever-ists might like to have a search engine that gives them results according to their political views. WHY does a search engine have to be non-biased?? Because this guy didn't follow the rules, was too lazy to fix it, and got hurt??? That's one of the reasons I think the Fairness doctrine is
Foundem is a SEARCH ENGINE. So I typed in 'price search engine'. Interestingly enough, Google was fourth on the list.....I couldn't find Foundem in the first 4 pages. Here are the meta tags on Foundem's home page ---
vertical search, price comparison, compare prices, flight search, hotel search, shop, buy, online, compare, best deals, best buy, prices, electronics, reviews, computers, job search, property search.
Wow ... no wonder they don't show up. They don't do anything UNIQUE. There are hundreds of companies doing the same thing. I guess they still haven't figured out how to get placement on a search engine.
Personally, I will discount this op-ed piece as little more than whining by some company too lazy to figure out what their market is, create a unique product, and spend the time and effort to get it to show up on Goggle's search engine. Lots of other companies do that just fine.....they must have skilled web staff working for them.
Or they figured if Google can't drive traffic to their web site, maybe the Times will. Seems the only advertising they want is 'free'.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Good luck legislating this. When Microsoft can pay Verizon $500 million to install a Bing search icon on their phones there's bound to be lots of push back and lobbying efforts to make sure this does not happen. Truly "neutral" search will never be a reality unless there's some movement to disclose back room deals such as this. But that can't happen, at least not easily. And I'm not sure if it should.
At some point consumers of services have to be smart enough to look out for themselves. The government won't be able to legislate away all risk.
A lot of this article is sour grapes.
The statement that Google Maps beat Mapquest because of preferential search treatment is hilarious. When google introduced the satellite view I recall reading (Wall street journal maybe?) that a mapquest executive had said he couldn't envision any need for the satellite view in a mapping service. (I just looked for the quote and couldn't find it. Too bad. Does this ring a bell with anyone? Bad as it sounded then, it sounds unbelievably idiotic now.) Mapquest just got beat by better technology.
...another clueless and arrogant American thinks that their morally declining country's FCC has jurisdiction over the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD.
So Google is a monopoly then. Won't they hear from anti-trust regulators if they abuse that position and try to gain an advantage in other markets like comparison shopping?
The last word on this goes to Ciaran Norris, who says: "I have to wonder whether the fact that Foundem apparently continues to rank well in Bing and Yahoo isn't in fact a perfect example of why those sites currently struggle to manage 10% market share between them."
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
This has to be the worst idea ever put forth on slashdot....ever
Google is a private company that lives and dies on the whims of the market. If they are incompetent and start to screw up their index, who knows it may happen, then people will leave. Geez, imagine if everything somebody didn't like had to be regulated? There is no law against being successful, well there shouldn't be unless you think like a loser. And furthermore, once you start regulating more than is absolutely necessary by "committee" you introduce inefficiencies into our wonderful free market system. Which may not be perfect but it gives us such an advantage that it would be stupid to throw it away over sour-grapes.
Shh.
"Today, news media like New York Times, Fox News, CNN have become the news gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in dictating what news is prominently visible to the people means they are now an essential component of the society. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond freedom of the press (freedom to publish your own newspaper) and include news neutrality: the principle that news media should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance."
I don't think it will happen in my lifetime though.
Oliver.
While admittedly people are lazy and wait until the last minute to make radical changes, I believe there will always be choices when it comes to the internet. Should Google control everything? Hell no. There should people that step up and take the same innovative risks that they do. Should the government be regulating them? Are we in China? Double Hell no! BING, YAHOO, CUIL, ASK, etc... should sack up and start innovating. Reinvest their earnings back into their business. As a capitalist, the idea of having a monopoly is quite intriguing (and perhaps desirable). As a Libertarian, or is it Librarian? As they say, the toothpaste is out of the tube... trying to stuff it back in will do nothing... people will "vote" with their search bars. If Google continues to drive relevant content, the people will be served. There is no profit long term in trying to force feed a result to the user. That is simply, killing the golden goose.
I get it, just like everything else, it will be fair and impartial. The FCC just let Comcast buy NBC, so clearly they could do no evil. OK sure I feel so much better... We can always trust laws to prevent unfairness and everyone will happy with what the money decides.
I am surprised everyone seems so against this idea.
I do not know about anyone else but i do not go about trying addresses in the address bar and hoping to get a relevant site. if it does not show up on the first page of google chances are I will never visit the web page.
But, from what I have seen google does not seen to do much censoring, so i am not really worried at this point.
and I would consider it important not to be censored from any part of the internet.
Not that they should not edit out the people that try to artificially raise their relevant lvl, but web pages should not be filtered because some religions/ethnic group has a problem with the material.
Not that we necessarily need laws and the government to regulate it, if their are enough people around that consider it important hopefully their will always be censor free searches around.
While the article might contain some parts that sound like they come from someone upset that their business failed and are just blaming google because it is easy to do so, I believe the fundamental idea of search neutrality is something to want.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
He probably broke Google's rules by doing shady SEO tricks and his site just isn't that popular. Why would people want to search for other search engines, anyhow? I want to find actual results, not endless pages filled with "searches" that lead to other searches but never have actual results.
Anyhow, although I agree with net neutrality (because we *can't* easily change ISPs, due to their natural monopoly), this "search neutrality" is utter crap. I can change search engines on a whim. But *I don't want to.* If I don't like the way Google does things, I will drop them. It won't be the first time, either. I used to use Altavista, back when it was the most comprehensive. I still remember, and would use, other search engines, but thanks to Google... I just don't need to.
If you want to get people to visit your site, make it something people want. Don't just whine if the search engines ignore you. You don't have any natural right to a certain ranking on search results (no matter how important it is to your bottom line), and I have to think that this would be an incredibly stupid thing to regulate.
Of course, politicians like regulating things they have no business regulating. *sigh*
You know what would be great? Nutrition neutrality. Screw search engines...that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's not fair that my triple cheeseburger makes me fatter than whatever skinny people are eating these days, so I want Congress to pass a law ensuring that every food tastes just as good and is just as healthy as every other food. With that and the law that makes Brad Pitt just as ugly as me and one more that makes Stephen Hawking just as dumb as me, I'm certain we'd all be happy.
search engines are supposed to discriminate. they pick a winner and a loser and rank everything inbetween. so this guys site was like every other shitty fucking link aggregator out there and google weeded it out for it's users. fuck you very much thanks for playing.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The reason it's so important for net neutrality laws to prevent ISP's from filtering or throttling traffic is because they have such a stranglehold on the market, and that monopoly/cartel is mostly government-protected. There's no way to bypass your ISP except via proxy or by switching ISP's, and many people have neither the technical knowledge to do the first, nor the availability of the second option. If you don't like the way a particular search engine behaves, just don't use a search engine, or switch to another. Telecoms are almost as impervious to market swings as the government itself, whereas there are new search engines popping up every day. Take cuil for instance. Besides, how are they going to regulate different types of search engines, for instance Bing vs. Google vs. Wolfram Alpha. Each of these engines has a very different idea of what is "relevant", even if you strip away any manipulation done for ulterior motives.
If Google screws around, there are always rival search engines that would give you the content you are looking for.
The real danger is that the Government might tell Google and other search engines to filter out what the Government considers to be "dangerous information", "State Secrets", or other nonsense.
Basically, we are talking Search Censorship.
EFF and others should lobby hard against *any* government interference into how online services conduct their service. We can decide for ourselves if the Search Engines are being fair, and if not, we can launch new search engines and watch the big ones loose market share.
KEEP THE INTERNET FREE.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
You use a search engine to pair down listings based on arbitrary criteria, and you want those results to be relevant. This means intelligent algorithms which are by their nature non-neutral.
Given that the internet is 99% porn, I think its a very, very bad idea to ban such relevance sorting. I'm sure parents will be happy with their congressman after their kid enters "jupiter" for a science project and gets 10 pages of XXX to sort through.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Another NY Times article that I won't be reading.
The concept of "neutrality" is best applied to things that tend to be natural monopolies, such as infrastructure, including high-speed internet connectivity.
The New York Times has also struggled with getting people to pay for their shit, and right now is part of an effort to bring pressure against Google anyway it can.
for example, the idea that right wing media versus left wing media is a new development, and in the past the media was neutral is downright laughable. look up "yellow journalism". point being: bias in media will never go away, and you simply should learn to develop a good bullshit meter
therefore, in the future, i fully expect search engines to develop a subtle or not so subtle bias. not that they don't have it already, just that this becomes part of their identity and common wisdom
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Private companies want to shape traffic to maximize their profits. Slashdot "Regulate! Regulate!" Private companies want to shape search results to maximize their profits. Slashdot "Don't Regulate! Don't Regulate" Adoration of Google around here is sort of like the citizens of a planet in the Star Wars Universe cheering the Clone Army kicking off the Separatists.
I'm sure that Google will innovate/improve to keep that from happening, but it's not as if I don't have a choice between any search provider. OTOH -- I set that in my browser. Having the ISP (I'm looking at you, Charter) hijaack the NXDOMAIN to go to their own engine is causing me serious heartburn (especially since I'm trying to *telnet* to a valhalla.private address!
When you all decided that network neutrality was such a great idea. Innovation is driven by need in the marketplace. The "war on marketplace need" is thus necessarily a war against innovation. What's the shortest route to the network not being a monopoly? A badly abused monopoly network! And we don't even freakin' have one of those! Practically everyone in the nation can get online via 3-4 of the following 5 media: satellite, cell network, short-range wireless, cable, or DSL. "Awww, but there's only one DSL provider and they charge $10/mo more than my brother gets charged in BigCity, BigState, and they throttle bittorrent and they say unlimited bandwidth but I heard they cut someone off at 700GB, and also my pussy hurts."
government sucks.
Actually, I think they bought a hyphen a while ago, so they're now experts-exchange.
That said, I still don't care to visit them any more than I want to visit Penisland, even though I know what both of those are...
We hadn't made getting here as easy as pushing an on/off switch.
The government can't come in and tell me how to run my own damn business, why should they tell Google? Why should it be any different to force a very clearly non-monopoly market to be regulated so extensively? If I don't want shirtless people coming into my store, they can't cuz I put up a sign. If I don't want certain results displayed on my search engine's website at all, I can remove them. It's ridiculous to treat search providers like utilities as if their operations are that critical.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I heard that Google weighs certain websites it deems more valuable over others, in addition to the default weight given by the PageRank algorithm. Can anyone confirm this?
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
(when dying)
I want you to tell my wife, hello.
the US health care system. We need *less* regulation...
Why would I want search nutrality? I don't want all search engines to return essentially the same results. I want Bing to return more Microsoft-centric results, and I want Google to return Google-centric results. I want community-oriented search engines to return community-centric results, and I want product-oriented search engines to return product-centric results.
When I want MSDN documentation, I want to go to Bing, search for javascript, and get the msdn javascript reference -- above the mozilla one.
You know, like when you want a science book, you went to a science book store. And when you wanted a book by a british author, you called a british book store.
It's all a part of considering the source -- in all senses of the words. I don't want everything to be the same.
If you look at the HTML source of Foundem, you find a set of meta keywords usually associated with webspam sites. Then there's a big block of ad-like links - Ipods, plasma TVs,"cheap flights", "fitness equipment online", etc. It looks like your typical junk link site.
The Register reported their troubles with Google back in 2006. What they were bitching about was not that "Foundem" disappeared from Google, but that all the pages of "price comparisons" they put up were pushed way down in search results. They were also hit with an AdWords penalty. This was written up as a case study in SEO fail.
However, at least they have a business address on the site.
Bing and Yahoo are already highly perverting search results. These practices are indefensible and inexcusable!
be reasonable to have search standards applied to them are the DNS NXDOMAIN search redirects, such as those used by comcast.
Since they are being forced upon their users, and those users are forced by regional monopolies to use that ISP.
FCC = Power And Freq's NOT THE WEB! or internet (sic) I hate the word internet.
I don't want the FCC doing anything but getting back to their missing "mission statement" People need a damn protection from oath breaking office appointments like the FCC . Seen the FCC's original mission statement? Neither have I Why is the "public spectrum" corporate owned? That's not FCC management from an FCC engineer's standpoint. It's also their mission statement FAILURE!!! Whoops . NOt. it's on purpose!
As for Local Stations.
Why aren't all their public files online by now?
It couldn't be the vague unfinished crappy language at the FCC could it? Couldn't be they don't want to put some "sting" (License, Frequency Allocation Forfeit) into bad public files with lots of condemnation from the public.
Local stations have websites, but not their public file available. (they claim it's to costly - Utter Nonsense, they also claim video and p2p are eating up the spectrum there too. Both can't be true.)
We need to start facing down our shitty corrupt officials. 65 trillion bucks into a cds blackhole and still only a handful of fuckers are in jail? Instead we (I mean they) are hiding the sausage with doctored reports. They're about out of things to do and the bill is going to come due
Communications are pretty much hosed in the US.
Corruption - Oath Breaking - Monetary Failure - War
Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's new Bing have become the Internet's gatekeepers
To be an "internet gatekeeper," don't you need people to actually visit your site first?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Google is sued right and left for whatever reasons. Publishing companies lobby governments to have google pay for the "right" to make them visible. Of course, this only works well if Google is taken the power to retaliate by removing certain sites from their results at will. So search neutrality generally sounds good, but who benefits most from it?
...looking for a problem.
At the intersection of computation and biology.
is using his papers to bash his competitiors - welcom the the UK media where Murdocs papers regulualy run articles trashhing the oposition and plugging Sky. Private Eye a satirical mag even has a section dedecated to this.
If your search engine were so great yet so undervalued, why hasn't it been bought out by Google already?
. . . so it will be ignored or modded down. This is Slashdot, where the entire world is regarded as "Too Liberal."
Search Engines should be neutral, legislators should not receive funds from corporations and special interests, and if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
Good luck with that !!!
The search would have to be government run and funded. It costs big money to run a search engine thats why cooperations like yahoo, google, MS run them. Lets also not forget how google really got big, and that is because of its image ads free home page.
Jack of all trades,master of none
"Credibility of your article nullified" - ad-hominem is irrelevant here.
To my mind, the article's main argument is that Google in the search market today is in the same position Microsoft was in the OS market in the 1990s (near monopoly of a critical technology). This by itself is not sufficient grounds for regulation, but if Google starts to leverage this monopoly to choke competition in related areas (as Microsoft did), then we have a problem. The article lists a couple of examples where Google might be doing this (mapping, real estate).
I don't think the evidence is sufficient to start talking about regulation, but the parallels to Microsoft aren't obviously false.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
You are conflating. My focus is on the market itself. As you say, there are many other factors but when you look at the market in isolation then you can say that is a good thing. Once you start melding other systems together they modify each other to an extent but that is a different topic than the purity of mine which is the market only.
Shh.
2.) Liberals love the idea of government control. It's the solution to absolutely everything.
Economic theory suggests that the Free Market Is Good. It also suggests that sometimes it fails. In those cases, Government Intrusion Is Good.
One case is public construction: in areas with very high fixed costs, it's more efficient to only build one of "them" and let everyone use it, rather than have several parties each build their own. Good examples are roads, electricity, telephony, internet.
Another one is natural monopolies, most often seen with network effects, where the value of "owning it" increases with how many people also "owns it". Again, roads, telephones, internet. Also Facebook accounts, and other networks overlaid on the internet.
If government did its job well, government stepping in would actually be The Right Thing.
What (some hardcore) right-wingers don't acknowledge is the sound theory. What (some hardcore) left-wingers don't acknowledge is the unsound practice of said theory.
If you want to know, empirically, how well the theory is converted into practice, I recommend the most recent episode of EconTalk (grab it at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/12/winston_on_mark.html), where the guest talks about exactly this.
I find it laughably ironic that a completely liberal-biased rag like the New York Times is calling for search engines to be neutral. Something about the pot calling the kettle black comes to mind or is it "people who live in glass houses should not throw stones?"