The solution is to mandate that Google publicly disclose their algorithms and the various weightings they apply to incentivize behavior and how much of an impact they have. Then everyone can see whether or not their behavior constitutes unfair bias, can test for themselves what's going on.
Google does not need or deserve the ability to keep the way all human knowledge is accessed and found today a trade secret.
Additional notes on this to address the obvious criticisms:
- Google would still have the benefit of it's actual data/crawled content that presumably would not be disclosed and constitutes a significant portion of their business advantages.
- It's unlikely competing search engines would somehow leapfrog Google's technology by having access to their search ranking algorithms. At best copying Google would make them "as good as Google", but you need to be "better than" to get people to switch or offer features and benefits they don't.
- Even if all of Google's data and algorithms were cloned by competitors, everyone would still by and large use Google because Google is the default on almost every platform and browser, and Google has a significant lock-in effect over their platforms.
Which is to say, requiring one of the world's most powerful monopolies to disclose the algorithms by which knowledge is found would have minimal to non-existent impact on their business but have significant benefit to society.
I think that would suggest that Google's protection against content farms and bad SEO is way more simplistic than it probably is. Sure, like security in the open source world, transparency would make it possible for bad actors to find flaws in their code, but it would similarly allow others to find and disclose to Google those flaws and offer suggestions on how to fix them.
Google does not need or deserve the ability to keep the way all human knowledge is accessed and found today a trade secret.
Additional notes on this to address the obvious criticisms:
- Google would still have the benefit of it's actual data/crawled content that presumably would not be disclosed and constitutes a significant portion of their business advantages.
- It's unlikely competing search engines would somehow leapfrog Google's technology by having access to their search ranking algorithms. At best copying Google would make them "as good as Google", but you need to be "better than" to get people to switch or offer features and benefits they don't.
- Even if all of Google's data and algorithms were cloned by competitors, everyone would still by and large use Google because Google is the default on almost every platform and browser, and Google has a significant lock-in effect over their platforms.
Which is to say, requiring one of the world's most powerful monopolies to disclose the algorithms by which knowledge is found would have minimal to non-existent impact on their business but have significant benefit to society.