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

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.

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.

Google maps and preferential search treatment?

[rmcd]

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.

Re:Google maps and preferential search treatment?

[Xeno man]

You can say the same thing about street view. At first though there is no piratical use of other than that's kind of neat but Google is out there with a custom car and hardware mapping out the cities of the world. Google is the first and so far the only ones to do that and it's that type of attitude that made Google as successful as it is.

The money quote:

[whoever57]

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."

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!