

'Search Neutrality' is neccessary to promote growth and innovation - jsm386
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28raff.html

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natrius
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.

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

WTF??

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japherwocky
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?

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nostrademons
Duck Duck Go has been doing a pretty good job of it, and from what I can tell,
it's just one guy, self-financed.

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jdrock
He primarily relies on Y!BOSS, which uses a $300M infrastructure.

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zck
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.

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nostrademons
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.

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cabalamat
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.

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mattj
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_

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furtivefelon
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.

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japherwocky
Did this line:

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

make anyone else immediately think, "Atlas Shrugged"?

