US First Amendment scholar notes that search engines are free speech

May 9, 2012 21:21 GMT  ·  By

There's been plenty of talk about so-called "search neutrality," the notion that search engines should give equal worth to services and websites regardless of their owners.

The argument is being made whenever companies are unhappy about Google ranking and believe they deserve better placement or believe that Google is artificially propping up its own service to the detriment of others.

It's hard to describe the idea behind search neutrality because there can never be such a thing, search engines are by definition not neutral, they're supposed to rank information by relevancy and not offer each and everyone equal placement.

What's more, search engines are designed to offer users relevant results, whichever they may be and in any form, not just list the top 10 sites related to the query.

One of the arguments against search neutrality is the fact that search results are "opinions," they're what the search engine "believes" users want to see.

It doesn't matter that the opinion is arrived at via algorithms, rather than human deliberation, search results are not an objective matter, but a subjective point of view.

As such, there can be no "right" or "wrong" answer, search engines are free to provide any info they want and leave it to the users to decide if it's what they want.

In the US in particular this is important since, if search results are opinions, then they are protected free speech under the First Amendment.

What this means is that the company can't be forced by a court to alter its search results in any way. That's the conclusion of a noted First Amendment scholar, UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh, in a report commissioned by Google.

"Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo! Search, and other search engines are speak­ers. First, they sometimes convey information that the search engine company has itself prepared or compiled," he writes in his paper.

"Second, they direct users to material created by others, by referencing the titles of Web pages that the search engines judge to be most responsive to the query,coupled with short excerpts from each page. Such reporting about others’ speech is itself constitutionally protected speech," he says.

"Third, and most valuably, search engines select and sort the results in a way that is aimed at giving users what the search engine companies see as the most helpful and useful information," he adds.