

Googles Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives - nashequilibrium
http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
&quot;It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this
type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.&quot;
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nashequilibrium
8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is
advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always
correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype
search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of
Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great
detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone
while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance
as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance
on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money
for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that
our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and
historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that
advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the
advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. Since it is very
difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is
particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be
selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for
particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious
than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who
is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an
uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant
bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine
could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and
subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very
difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market.
Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor

