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.'"

Comments

Huh...

[Ethanol-fueled]

TFA:

For three years, my company's vertical search and price-comparison site, Foundem, was effectively "disappeared" from the Internet in this way.

Inability to explain why. Credibility of your article nullified. Samzenpus is trolling.

Because of its domination of the global search market and ability to penalize competitors while placing its own services at the top of its search results, Google has a virtually unassailable competitive advantage.

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.

Google's treatment of Foundem stifled our growth and constrained the development of our innovative search technology.

Try teaming up with Metacrawler, they are many times as powerful as google.

Even AdWords and AdSense, the phenomenally efficient economic engines behind Google's meteoric success, are essentially borrowed inventions:

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.

Will it embrace search neutrality as the logical extension to net neutrality that truly protects equal access to the Internet?

I dunno, will you tell me exactly why you feel you've been shortchanged by Google?

Re:Huh...

[wizardforce]

Indeed. If you take a look at the site in question, there doesn't seem to be anything about it that jumps out as being novel. It looks like the author created a mediocre search/link site and expected to be in the top results. The telling bit about the whole affair is that the author claims that the site was virtually off the net in terems of searches for three years yet that would largely require the top two or three search engines to do essentially the same thing which probably more than anything leads one to suspect that there's something about the site its self rather than multiple search engines that is the problem.

Sure, that's great.

[palegray.net]

Let's go ahead and regulate the living crap out of everything online... that's sure to do wonders for innovation.

Re:Sure, that's great.

[Col. Klink (retired)]

With neutrality rules in place, every search engine will:

(1) Need a license or certificate showing that they have been tested and validated. This, in itself, is a barrier to entry.

(2) Results of the search engine will expect to follow the pre-existing norms. Anything innovative, original or experimental will not likely fit into the existing set of regulations and will automatically be out-of-compliance.

Supposed if I wanted to develop a search engine to promote free and open source software. It's not really intended to be a "general purpose" search engine but, instead, is designed to find free alternatives to commercial software. The idea is that you can search for "excel" and it will find you info about Open Office, koffice, etc. It's my own website that I'm paying for at my expense to promote my own personal beliefs.

Along comes Microsoft, a licensed search company. They are, to be sure, not happy that a search engine helps people find alternatives to their software. They complain to the license board that I don't have a license and my site is shut down. Or, I suppose, I could get a license (and have to pass certification on topics unrelated to my search niche). And since the goal of this license is "neutrality," I can't have results that leave out proprietary software. In fact, my search engine can't even legally endorse free software.

Licensing boards exist to maintain the status quo. Innovation is about changing the status quo.

Fail.

[girlintraining]

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.

telcos have been granted a natural monopoly

[seanadams.com]

... 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?

What an absurd idea

[pclminion]

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.

Sour grapes

[whoever57]

Here is the motivation for the article:

For three years, my company's vertical search and price-comparison site, Foundem, was effectively "disappeared" from the Internet in this way.

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?

Monopolies and the purview of the FCC

[Pfhorrest]

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.

Exactly

[headkase]

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.

I like Net Neutrality, but this idea is crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

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*

Re:New York Times...

[FictionPimp]

how can you determine relevance while being impartial?

Well condoms are really not relevant to sexual education from a religious nut point of view. I mean sex eduction really just means telling them not to do it....

Bah. Need to enforce NXDomain!

[bingemaster]

Ya know, if a better competitor (from the public's POV, not from "Foundem" biased viewpoint) appears, Google will fade. Anyone remember:

• wwww.com - the world wide web worm?
• lycos?
• yahoo?
• altavista?

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!