14 DAY TRIAL // Google is under more and more pressure from more and more groups concerned with its size. Google dominates the search market, in some countries by huge margins, and, subsequently, the online advertising market. It also has countless web products, Maps, Gmail, Docs. More and more, a call for ‘search neutrality’ is being made calling for regulation, government oversight or opening up search algorithm. It’s one thing for unheard of companies and people seeking attention to do it, it’s another when a respected news organization does it.
The New York Times ran an editorial arguing whether Google’s search technology shouldn’t be regulated by the government to ensure that it plays fair. It doesn’t actually say that this is the way to go, but the tone of the article is clear.
“[T]he potential impact of Google’s algorithm on the Internet economy is such that it is worth exploring ways to ensure that the editorial policy guiding Google’s tweaks is solely intended to improve the quality of the results and not to help Google’s other businesses,” the article reads.
It does list the problems with some of the proposed methods, opening up the algorithm would lead to gaming and regulation would stifle innovation, but the conclusion still is that something must be done.
Most people agree that ‘search neutrality’ as a concept simply doesn’t make sense. We use search engines precisely because they’re not neutral, the favor some websites over others based on what the algorithm deems relevant. A neutral search engine would be useless. Likewise, having the ranking algorithms adhere to government imposed guidelines would cripple competition in the search space.
Search analyst Danny Sullivan draws an interesting parallel between a newspaper’s editorial guidelines and Google’s ranking methods. He also shows why, even if Google dominates the market, there is no need to fear that this would somehow prevent us from accessing relevant information.
Google also issued a response, of sorts. It published an op-ed in the Financial Times (FT), on the same day that the New York Times piece, but it was actually in response to a previous article in the FT. It later published it in the Google Public Policy blog, since content in FT is behind a paywall.
“Search engines use algorithms and equations to produce order and organisation online where manual effort cannot. These algorithms embody rules that decide which information is ‘best,’ and how to measure it. Clearly defining which of any product or service is best is subjective. Yet in our view, the notion of ‘search neutrality’ threatens innovation, competition and, fundamentally, your ability as a user to improve how you find information,” Marissa Mayer, VP of search and user experience at Google, wrote.
The piece goes through the list of common arguments against ‘search neutrality.’ There is no such thing as a ‘fair’ listing of search results, other than the one based on relevance. And relevance, even if determined by an algorithm, is subjective. Mayer also makes it clear that opening up the algorithm would lead to abuse.
“But the strongest arguments against rules for ‘neutral search’ is that they would make the ranking of results on each search engine similar, creating a strong disincentive for each company to find new, innovative ways to seek out the best answers on an increasingly complex web,” she explains. “Neutrality forcing standardized results removes the potential for innovation and turns search into a commodity.”
Debate is healthy. And no one, not even Google, is downplaying the powerful role it has in people’s lives. But the company is already subject to scrutiny in all the countries it operates in. Anti-trust policies work and regulators are increasingly focused on Google. And there are alternatives; Bing and Yahoo are more than capable of providing relevant results if Google doesn’t do the job.