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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?
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
As Techdirt stated, this story was: Vetted By Malnourished Monkeys. Apparently the same this happened here. Yay.
That's the link I was looking for. Mods take notice of parent's post please? Here is a tidbit:
NYT Runs Quack, Self-Serving Anti-Google OpEd By Paul Kedrosky Monday, December 28, 2009 ShareThis There is a quack, self-serving, and silly search-related OpEd in Monday's NY Times that would be amusing, if it weren't so indelibly dumb. In it the founder of a company, Foundem, in the search business alleges that search company Google should be investigated and forced to do a better job of highlighting firms like his. Gosh, what a shocker. Someone in search with minimal web traffic -- Compete says Foundem gets a little less web traffic than The Fortune Cookie Chronicles does, which is to say around 1,700 a month -- wants someone in search with a lot of web traffic, Google, to send his company buckets of visitors. Amazing. The OpEd goes downhill from there. We get a litany of silly complaints, like the idea that Google doesn't innovate, that it just buys stuff from others, and that Google's Maps and other products have hurt other companies. Yeesh. I'll say this really slowly: Consumers want products that work together, simplify our lives, and solve problems. For this nitwit to want to throw us back to a world where we need point products -- maps here, directions there, product search there, email over there, etc. -- as some sort of full-employment act for me-too companies that can't get web traffic on their own merits is batshit nuts. Of course, there is a second level of stupid to this piece, and that goes to the NYT itself. It took until the fourth paragraph of the piece until we find out that the OpEd author is, you know, conflicted in that he himself runs a search company (albeit one with negligible traffic). Not only that, he has an axe to grind, as he goes on in paragraph four to arm-wavingly allege that Google "disappeared" his site from its results...
It goes on from there. Excellent piece overall.
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*
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.
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!
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.