'Search Neutrality' is neccessary to promote growth and innovation

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28raff.html

by jsm386 • 17 years ago

23 18 17 years ago

natrius2• 17 years ago

Why do people write silly things? How would you enforce "search neutrality"? How do you define "relevance"?

Network neutrality is necessitated by the lack of competition in the telecommunications market. If Time Warner and AT&T both enact policies I disagree with, I'm screwed. There are plenty of search engines, there is a relatively low barrier to entry for new search engines, and the switching cost is zero.

No, we shouldn't try to regulate the author's business plan into viability.

elyada• 17 years ago

> there is a relatively low barrier to entry for new search engines

WTF??

apsurd• 17 years ago

because your comment is not thought out thoroughly at all. I'm not a great coder by any standards, but with a couple simple command lines, you can build an index quite easily. Then there's 80legs.com, and well...

your comment was not thought out thoroughly all all.

natrius2• 17 years ago

New search engines pop up often. Off the top of my head: Cuil and Powerset. How often do new telecommunications companies pop up? The key word was relatively. Search engines aren't lemonade stands, but they aren't telecom companies either.

japherwocky2• 17 years ago

I guess this is just asking for negative karma, but I too thought that the conventional wisdom was that the barrier to entry for search engines was relatively high.

No, not telecom high, but it does take a pretty significant amount of hardware to index and deliver that much data. No?

gojomo• 17 years ago

I agree 'search neutrality' is an absurd thing to try to have regulators enforce, but I'd put it in the "just as absurd as 'net neutrality'" bucket.

After all, Google has more of the search market than Time Warner or AT&T have of the home broadband markets -- and higher margins, and a greater market-cap.

There aren't many web-scale search engines, and the 'barrier' isn't you typing in a different URL, it's running the giant cluster, with proprietary algorithms, to offer acceptable results, and reach an economical scale (on the ad side, as well), against now-ingrained customer habits.

It would take years and lots of money, innovation, and luck to dislodge Google -- just the same as it would take to offer a new set of wires or wireless links to home users.

Dobbs• 17 years ago

The issue with net neutrality is not to do with market share but to do with the fact that many of the telecommunication companies have exclusive monopolies in their areas often with government mandates.

In addition they were given large sums of money by the government to implement certain styles of networks that were never implemented.

Then they also have alternative revenue streams (e.g. comcast provides television, qwest phone). These alternative revenue streams are often in competition with services that are on the internet (e.g. hulu, and skype).

So they are guaranteed their places by government assistance and they have conflicts of interest. This is why we need net neutrality.

jsm386• 17 years ago

I agree that we shouldn't try to regulate the author's business plan into viability, but at some point, and Google has to be close to that point in search and cpc advertising, antitrust questions come into play.

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

I don't think Google would disagree. Usually, when there's a "penalty" to a site's ranking, it's because the site is doing something that harms users, eg. malware, adspam. Google (and other search engines) has a vested interest in making sure that users find relevant, helpful results, because that's the only way they can keep them coming back.

cabalamat2• 17 years ago

Reading between the lines, I bet that's what happened with the writer's startup Foundem: they probably used black hat SEO techniques, and were penalised for it.

furtivefelon• 17 years ago

The stated goal of search is to find relevant information. If Google somehow provides that information to me in a easy to digest way, who am i to refuse it? If not, i would go elsewhere for that information. Since net neutrality ensures that i can always go to an alternative source for information, i don't think search dominance is too much of a problem.

mattj• 17 years ago

The bigger issue is not negative impacts on ranking, but large search engines promoting content from their other properties inside the results. cough one box cough

japherwocky2• 17 years ago

Did this line:

"Without search neutrality rules to constrain Google’s competitive advantage"

make anyone else immediately think, "Atlas Shrugged"?

zck• 17 years ago

My comment from a dead link to a blog entry on this NYT article:

>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...The preferential placement of Google Maps helped it unseat MapQuest from its position as America’s leading online mapping service virtually overnight.

Alternately, it was a better product. Remember the first time you were able to drag a map? It wasn't in Mapquest. Let's see which is better today. I'm looking for New York City. I go to maps.google.com, and see a single search box. I type in NYC, and I see, within a second, the five boroughs I was looking for. Well done you, Google.

Next, I go to mapquest. They've got multiple search boxes, so I have to break up my search into address/city/state/zip code boxes? Ugh. Is it still 1998? Ok, I put in NYC into the "City" field, and the whole screen dims, with a box saying "processing". Even after the processing box goes away, the screen is still dimmed. How ugly. I scroll down to the map, and see that nothing's changing, even after waiting two minutes. I click, and the dim screen lightens, but I haven't gone anywhere. I go back to the search boxes, and again, search NYC. Oh, it's popping up a "which did you mean" alert next to the search box where I wasn't looking. 2 results: 1. Nyce Lake, AZ 2. Nyctea Hills, AK.

If this is their example of "unfair competitive advantage", I want more of it.

'Search Neutrality' is neccessary to promote growth and innovation

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