It is no longer appropriate for search to be under the thumb of
private industry. It's a critical part of the national infrastructure.
So if I were a real pinko, I'd be advocating for the nationalization of
Google, à la Chavez—but I'm not a real pinko. Besides, the American
people have already bought and paid for an ideal alternative to Google.
That's right: we have the means in hand to create a public, ad-free,
totally fair and reasonably transparent search engine with a legal
mandate to operate in the public interest, and most of the work is
already done. We have also a huge staff of engineers to conclude what
little remains on the development and deployment side.
Who are these American heroes, soon to be accepting the thanks of a grateful nation? Why, our fellow citizens, the software engineers and tech gurus and endless numbers of contractors of the NSA! Why don't they make themselves useful and stop spying on everyone and instead, use all that computing power and archived information to make us a fair, fast, ad-free search engine?
They have a copy of the whole Internet, soon to be housed in their giant bunker in Utah!
It is already, apparently, equipped with the latest in search technology! It's probably already better than Google.
Others make their case against Google on antitrust laws. It's not
illegal to have a monopoly. According to U.S. courts, it's just not your
fault that everybody loves your product! What's illegal is using that
power to do bad things, like suppress your own competition. This is why
there are ongoing government investigations into Google's
anti-competitive business practices in the U.S., in Canada and in Europe.
Probes like these have so far tended to focus on Google's preferential treatment of its own services over those of its competitors in Google search results. Which amounts to ignoring the elephant in the room: Google, with its 67% share of U.S. search traffic (sounds low, tbh), has a potential influence far beyond the industries in which it operates formally. At the moment, Google can legally use its power to make or break any business, or any politician, publication, or public figure it chooses, for any old reason it wants, provided that reason doesn't fall foul of antitrust laws.
For instance, let's suppose one of Google co-founder Sergey Brin's friends were to open a new cafe in Mountain View: there is no legal proscription whatsoever against Google's vaulting the Friends o' Brin Cafe to the top of results on searches for "best cafe Mountain View." Or even "best cafe."
A close reading of Google's ten "Core Principles" appears to suggest, but not quite guarantee, that Google won't simply grant preferential treatment at its own discretion. The fact is, however, that it's entirely up to them. Given the understandably secret nature of Google's algorithms and other techniques for determining search results, it would be impossible to say whether or not this is in fact already happening.
Already companies live or die at the hands of Google. Any update to the Google Panda search ranking algorithm has rippling effects through the Internet. One thing that seems to be the case: older sites, with thousands of internal links and a deep history on the Internet, seem to be constantly downgraded. That's bad news for some non-spam media companies that in part live off search traffic. Google results, in general, overweight newness. It is becoming more and more impossible to find relevant results older than three months.
As well, Google will tell you that active engagement with their product Google+ will be "beneficial" to any publisher as a whole, including in search. Publishers now ignore Google+ at their peril, whether it is relevant to their business or not.
But let's take the real case of 23andMe.com, the "privately-held personal genetics company" whose CEO, Anne Wojcicki, is married to Sergey Brin. According to recent SEC filings, Google invested approximately $1.5 million in the company's Series D round, and Google leases office space to the company. Here's the current results for a search on the phrase "genetic testing":
Who are these American heroes, soon to be accepting the thanks of a grateful nation? Why, our fellow citizens, the software engineers and tech gurus and endless numbers of contractors of the NSA! Why don't they make themselves useful and stop spying on everyone and instead, use all that computing power and archived information to make us a fair, fast, ad-free search engine?
They have a copy of the whole Internet, soon to be housed in their giant bunker in Utah!
It is already, apparently, equipped with the latest in search technology! It's probably already better than Google.
Probes like these have so far tended to focus on Google's preferential treatment of its own services over those of its competitors in Google search results. Which amounts to ignoring the elephant in the room: Google, with its 67% share of U.S. search traffic (sounds low, tbh), has a potential influence far beyond the industries in which it operates formally. At the moment, Google can legally use its power to make or break any business, or any politician, publication, or public figure it chooses, for any old reason it wants, provided that reason doesn't fall foul of antitrust laws.
For instance, let's suppose one of Google co-founder Sergey Brin's friends were to open a new cafe in Mountain View: there is no legal proscription whatsoever against Google's vaulting the Friends o' Brin Cafe to the top of results on searches for "best cafe Mountain View." Or even "best cafe."
A close reading of Google's ten "Core Principles" appears to suggest, but not quite guarantee, that Google won't simply grant preferential treatment at its own discretion. The fact is, however, that it's entirely up to them. Given the understandably secret nature of Google's algorithms and other techniques for determining search results, it would be impossible to say whether or not this is in fact already happening.
Already companies live or die at the hands of Google. Any update to the Google Panda search ranking algorithm has rippling effects through the Internet. One thing that seems to be the case: older sites, with thousands of internal links and a deep history on the Internet, seem to be constantly downgraded. That's bad news for some non-spam media companies that in part live off search traffic. Google results, in general, overweight newness. It is becoming more and more impossible to find relevant results older than three months.
As well, Google will tell you that active engagement with their product Google+ will be "beneficial" to any publisher as a whole, including in search. Publishers now ignore Google+ at their peril, whether it is relevant to their business or not.
But let's take the real case of 23andMe.com, the "privately-held personal genetics company" whose CEO, Anne Wojcicki, is married to Sergey Brin. According to recent SEC filings, Google invested approximately $1.5 million in the company's Series D round, and Google leases office space to the company. Here's the current results for a search on the phrase "genetic testing":
No comments:
Post a Comment