The Need For Search Neutrality 203
wilsone8 writes "The New York Times includes an op-ed today arguing for Search Neutrality: 'Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's new Bing have become the Internet's gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include search neutrality: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.'"
Huh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Inability to explain why. Credibility of your article nullified. Samzenpus is trolling.
Google, a company based in America, has an autocomplete-style guessing algorithm which showed "Michelle Obama monkey" as the first choice when one typed in "michelle". It was so fair that they had to alter their own results and provide a disclaimer for the sake of political correctness. Apparently that wasn't even the first time they'd dealt with that situation. I'd say Google is fair until assholes like article author started bitching and moaning.
Try teaming up with Metacrawler [wikipedia.org], they are many times as powerful as google.
Yeah, Toyota also borrowed the wheel from somebody. It's only a matter of time until they're sued in the East district of Texas.
I dunno, will you tell me exactly why you feel you've been shortchanged by Google?
New York Times... (Score:3, Insightful)
...talking about "comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance."?
Barf.
Re:New York Times... (Score:5, Insightful)
how can you determine relevance while being impartial?
Well condoms are really not relevant to sexual education from a religious nut point of view. I mean sex eduction really just means telling them not to do it....
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When you use a search engine, you can have only two of the following: comprehensive, impartial and relevant.
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I dunno, will you tell me exactly why you feel you've been shortchanged by Google?
If it keeping moving, regulate it.
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If it keeps moving, regulate it.
Using that logic, in order to raise former President Reagan from the dead, all we would need to do is subsidize him.
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If it keeps moving, regulate it.
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Inability to explain why. Credibility of your article nullified.
Agreed.
But to play Devil's advocate for a second, let's assume that the author's company really was legitimate, and really was being "discriminated against" (whether deliberately, or because someone at Google mistook them for search-engine spammers.)
OK, so we have a legitimate company that has been "discriminated against". That still doesn't explain why Google needs to be regulated... there are thousands of scammers who aren't legitimate, and would *love* to be able to game search engines with impunity, m
Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like... (Score:2, Insightful)
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the US health care system. We need *less* regulation...
From both government and private bureaucrats. Cutting middle men into people's health is a terrible idea. Who allowed that?
Oh. Nixon.
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Re:Exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
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..And the only reason why Microsoft is really allowed to dominate the OS market is due to artificial regulations put in by the government (software patents) and government sponsorship.
What does Microsoft's success have to do with software patents? Microsoft would be able to dominate the OS market without a single software patent. I'm not sure what you base your argument on. Microsoft got where it is through greed, corruption, sheer luck, and the laziness and ignorance of business and home consumers. Nothing to do with patents.
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Erm. I hear libertarian types say this a bit. But can you please provide an actual concrete example of this in action? Because I'll be damned if I can think of a mechanism that doesn't completely contradict modern economics that'd make this work.
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Re:Huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. If you take a look at the site in question, there doesn't seem to be anything about it that jumps out as being novel. It looks like the author created a mediocre search/link site and expected to be in the top results. The telling bit about the whole affair is that the author claims that the site was virtually off the net in terems of searches for three years yet that would largely require the top two or three search engines to do essentially the same thing which probably more than anything leads one to suspect that there's something about the site its self rather than multiple search engines that is the problem.
The money quote: (Score:5, Informative)
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I like Net Neutrality, but this idea is crap. (Score:4, Insightful)
He probably broke Google's rules by doing shady SEO tricks and his site just isn't that popular. Why would people want to search for other search engines, anyhow? I want to find actual results, not endless pages filled with "searches" that lead to other searches but never have actual results.
Anyhow, although I agree with net neutrality (because we *can't* easily change ISPs, due to their natural monopoly), this "search neutrality" is utter crap. I can change search engines on a whim. But *I don't want to.* If I don't like the way Google does things, I will drop them. It won't be the first time, either. I used to use Altavista, back when it was the most comprehensive. I still remember, and would use, other search engines, but thanks to Google... I just don't need to.
If you want to get people to visit your site, make it something people want. Don't just whine if the search engines ignore you. You don't have any natural right to a certain ranking on search results (no matter how important it is to your bottom line), and I have to think that this would be an incredibly stupid thing to regulate.
Of course, politicians like regulating things they have no business regulating. *sigh*
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SEO's, if anything, should be regulated. By very definition they aim to circumvent "search neutrality" by artificially inflating the relevance of a result.
There's a difference between putting the news that you've launched a website and trying to make sure that it's the only destination people end up at.
SEO's are a cancer on "Web 2.0". Forcing users to clean their spam and type in barely legible captchas... all so our search results can less useful?
Google is fine. Fix SEOs by making their scams a crime.
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The author of TFA is upset because despite his best efforts to aggregate other people's information to drive revenues for his site (ie, leech off the actual stores) Google apparently decided that "Foundem" was a worthless piece of affiliate-link-baiting crap. It's essentially one step above making nothing but blog posts about different sites prices, all conveniently linked to one affiliate account.
Any credibility the author of TFA *might* have had goes out the window when he claims that MapQuest was dethron
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I'd be happy to have strong network neutrality strongly enforced. Search neutrality is nice but nearly unworkable in any reasonable sense it seems.
Instead of saying these companies have to be neutral I think it would be better to require them to show their work. Post in a database what they are scoring up or down and why and perhaps provide some reasonable method of recourse for parties who believe they have been unfairly targeted.
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If you google for "Foundem", the first site you'll find is... Foundem.
What you get when you visit this site is a prize comparison site just like all the other ones you already knew.
Perhaps the reason google doesn't list it that high is because there is nothing really special about this site; it isn't more relevant than it's competitors.
When you search for "price comparison", you'll find pages full of price comparison sites or articles about price comparison, all perfectly valid search results.
Foundem is on
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Ah yes. The old "they're not helping me spread my word, therefore they are suppressing me!" argument. Which, just like everytime it comes up on Slashdot, is complete hogwash.
Let me explain to the Foundem founder what has to be explained every time to Slashdot newbies: no one has an obligation to make sure that your site or opinion has to be heard by everyone. If Google would not exist, the Foundem founder would be faced with the exact same problem as now: no one knows about his site. And what solution exist
Who Cares About The Sour Grapes? (Score:2)
"Credibility of your article nullified" - ad-hominem is irrelevant here.
To my mind, the article's main argument is that Google in the search market today is in the same position Microsoft was in the OS market in the 1990s (near monopoly of a critical technology). This by itself is not sufficient grounds for regulation, but if Google starts to leverage this monopoly to choke competition in related areas (as Microsoft did), then we have a problem. The article lists a couple of examples where Google might be
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When you start with two extremely broad generalizations, your conclusions aren't going to be very good.
1. The New York Times has more liberal views than conservative ones, that's true. But I'm not going to stand here and call, say, Ross Douthat or David Brooks liberals. It was the home of William Safire as well. So to say "the New York Times is full of liberals" isn't a complete picture. If anything, the most consistent stance I've seen from the Times is staunch support of Israel regardless of what they did
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I think the editorial is not due to their ideological bent, but rather about big media's desire to reduce the power of search engines. Consider:
1. The big newspapers used to have little competition, as their markets were heavily localized. The Internet, and specifically news search and aggregation services like Google, have reversed that dynamic. Newspapers are now heavily dependent on companies like Google to drive online traffic (and thus ad revenue) to them, rather than to their many competitors. They
mouahahah! (Score:2)
But now it's too late, my plan worked perfectly five years ago!!
Surprise, surprise... (Score:3, Insightful)
...the mouthpiece for the State clamoring for MORE State control.
Shocking.
That's impossible. (Score:2)
And PS, keep the goddamned Feds out of search.
Sure, that's great. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just remember, if Google was not allowed to manually tweak it's search results, we'd forever have the system that lets us know that Target fails to carry products catering to male self-stimulation needs:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Atarget.com+%2B%22We+could+not+find+matches+for%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi= [google.com]
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You seem confused as to what regulation is, it's not some magical god like intelligence that magically makes something unbiased. It's a bunch of words being implemented by a bunch of people who couldn't get any other job.
Define biased. Define unbiased. Legally, strictly. Can you remove a spam site? What defines a spam site? What algorithms are allowed? Can you filter based on complaints? Human editors? Only algorithms? Which algorithms? What are the guidelines? Who checks if the guidelines are met? How are
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Having a dumber search is... harder? Maybe I'm not an expert on the subject, but it seems to me that having a search engine that's biased would in fact be more complicated than an unbiased search engine..
Thanks for the teletype font. These easy-to-read proportional fonts are simply a passing fad.
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Don't forget, in addition to the normal operating costs, you will need an army of lawyers to handle, by hand, every single complaint from every single website that believes that their site is rightfully the top link.
Consider the size of the SEO industry (ethical and otherwise), and convince me that every SEO out there won't focus all their efforts on legal claims against search engines.
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Having a dumber search is... harder? Maybe I'm not an expert on the subject, but it seems to me that having a search engine that's biased would in fact be more complicated than an unbiased search engine..
You ignore here that there are valid reasons for a biased search engine. First, as mentioned by another replier, there are search engine optimizers out there that will game any system, legal or otherwise. You need to bias your search system against people deliberately trying to raise their ranking by gaming your search engine. Second, sites like Google use metadata on their users to enhance the search results. Those are biases as well since not everyone's search results will be the same.
Finally, a dumber
Re:Sure, that's great. (Score:5, Insightful)
With neutrality rules in place, every search engine will:
(1) Need a license or certificate showing that they have been tested and validated. This, in itself, is a barrier to entry.
(2) Results of the search engine will expect to follow the pre-existing norms. Anything innovative, original or experimental will not likely fit into the existing set of regulations and will automatically be out-of-compliance.
Supposed if I wanted to develop a search engine to promote free and open source software. It's not really intended to be a "general purpose" search engine but, instead, is designed to find free alternatives to commercial software. The idea is that you can search for "excel" and it will find you info about Open Office, koffice, etc. It's my own website that I'm paying for at my expense to promote my own personal beliefs.
Along comes Microsoft, a licensed search company. They are, to be sure, not happy that a search engine helps people find alternatives to their software. They complain to the license board that I don't have a license and my site is shut down. Or, I suppose, I could get a license (and have to pass certification on topics unrelated to my search niche). And since the goal of this license is "neutrality," I can't have results that leave out proprietary software. In fact, my search engine can't even legally endorse free software.
Licensing boards exist to maintain the status quo. Innovation is about changing the status quo.
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> You have built a straw-man by trying to define neutrality as the opposite of innovation.
No, regulation is the opposite of innovation. The plan here is to regulate to enforce neutrality.
> Did you take bribes from companies to get their rankings higher? Did you artificially remove something from your search engine because you didn't like it?
In my example, I most certainly did remove Microsoft because I don't like them. That was the point of my proposed engine, to search for things that I like and n
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Fail. (Score:5, Insightful)
The principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.
The definition of comprehensive depends on the computational resources of the provider.
The definition of impartiality depends on the morality of the observer.
The definition of relevance depends on entirely subjective criteron.
You can't legislate these things. They're intangible. And besides, Google (and many other search engines) rely on the ability to edit their results to defeat attempts to game the algorithms they use. Legislation that limits that would ironically worsen the very attribute it is attempting to improve! It would allow search engine spammers free reign. The solution here is not to regulate... If a search engine sucks, it'll be replaced by a vendor that offers an alternative that sucks less. But if you must legislate, I would take a minimalist approach -- only regulate that which is proven harmful.
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do not have sufficient command of Latin
on -> a plurals are from Greek, not Latin. Latin is um -> a.
Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls (Score:3, Insightful)
Encarta, possibly the most successful commercial digital encyclopedia of all time is based on the old Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia which unfortunately was subpar to Brittanica and World Book by miles.
Microsoft took that shoddy encyclopedia, added content, added media, added hyperlinks, and turned the paper volumes into the best digital encyclopedia you could (at that time) buy.
But facts are facts. You can't really alter the information of an encyclopedia without someone calling you on it. In the same way, search engines categorize and comb through volumes of information and return data as best it can. Sometimes that data is useless (spam), but other times it is very pertinent (vanity searches).
If Google or Bing can't restrict what is shown in their search results, the value of the search tool is reduced. As we have seen in recent years, Google's search results are getting worse and worse, being flooded by spammers and expertsexchange links that include a couple of search terms but either have nothing to do with the search or require registration to access.
Leave the right to determine what they will return to the search providers. Guarantee that the tool remains useful by allowing them to cull the results responsibly.
Re:Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sorry, I haven't seen those ExpertSexChange links that include a couple of search terms but either have nothing to do with the search that you talk about. Are you sure it's not something to do with your search terms?
Re:Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls (Score:4, Informative)
As we have seen in recent years, Google's search results are getting worse and worse, being flooded by spammers and expertsexchange links that include a couple of search terms but either have nothing to do with the search or require registration to access.
Add this to your user CSS:
First line hides expertsexchange links in Google search results. Second adds a red idiot warning after any that you might come across elsewhere.
telcos have been granted a natural monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
... and in exchange, they deserve that we regulate the fuck out of them to just sell us the bits.
Google's search is a free service with multiple competitors and negligible customer lock-in. See the difference?
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As a practical matter, they are granted because the conventional wisdom is that they would be natural monopolies, and granting them is ultimately in the best interests of the public as it avoids nasty corporate bickering and proprietary hardware incompatibilities.
Not to say that the argument is borne out by reality, but it can be reasonably stated that, at least according to "what everyone knows", telco monopolies are both natural and government-granted monopolies.
What an absurd idea (Score:5, Insightful)
If "relevance" is a requirement, then the government will have to produce a definition of "relevance." Wow, I love this idea. Instead of allowing the advancement of technology, we have to conform to a government definition, and if we rank our search results contrary to that definition, our search engine is ILLEGAL. And I'm sure the government won't abuse their ability to declare certain results orderings to be illegal.
Stay the hell away from my search engines. If I'm not happy with the one I'm using, I'll switch to another.
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If I'm not happy with the one I'm using, I'll switch to another.
Exactly, this is the reason why people started using Google in the first place. Everything else was absolutely full of spam, enough that relevant articles were sometimes first listed on the second or third page of results. I can see companies abusing this, but I suspect communities such as Slashdot will scream bloody murder when results are found to be skewed. From there, it's our choice to keep using it or move on to the next startup with a good search mechanism.
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Do we want our google to be China's google?
MALNOURISHED MONKEYS! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MALNOURISHED MONKEYS! (Score:5, Informative)
As Techdirt stated, this story was: Vetted By Malnourished Monkeys. Apparently the same this happened here. Yay.
That's the link [kedrosky.com] I was looking for. Mods take notice of parent's post please? Here is a tidbit:
NYT Runs Quack, Self-Serving Anti-Google OpEd By Paul Kedrosky Monday, December 28, 2009 ShareThis There is a quack, self-serving, and silly search-related OpEd in Monday's NY Times that would be amusing, if it weren't so indelibly dumb. In it the founder of a company, Foundem, in the search business alleges that search company Google should be investigated and forced to do a better job of highlighting firms like his. Gosh, what a shocker. Someone in search with minimal web traffic -- Compete says Foundem gets a little less web traffic than The Fortune Cookie Chronicles does, which is to say around 1,700 a month -- wants someone in search with a lot of web traffic, Google, to send his company buckets of visitors. Amazing. The OpEd goes downhill from there. We get a litany of silly complaints, like the idea that Google doesn't innovate, that it just buys stuff from others, and that Google's Maps and other products have hurt other companies. Yeesh. I'll say this really slowly: Consumers want products that work together, simplify our lives, and solve problems. For this nitwit to want to throw us back to a world where we need point products -- maps here, directions there, product search there, email over there, etc. -- as some sort of full-employment act for me-too companies that can't get web traffic on their own merits is batshit nuts. Of course, there is a second level of stupid to this piece, and that goes to the NYT itself. It took until the fourth paragraph of the piece until we find out that the OpEd author is, you know, conflicted in that he himself runs a search company (albeit one with negligible traffic). Not only that, he has an axe to grind, as he goes on in paragraph four to arm-wavingly allege that Google "disappeared" his site from its results...
It goes on from there. Excellent piece overall.
Thank you for playing (Score:2)
Here, there's this thing called the First Amendment [findlaw.com]. You may have heard of it. This is nothing more than some dingbat whose business it isn't to insert his nose where it don't belong. Once you accept his premise, spammers can also force changes in Google etc. rankings based on their own notion of "relevance". ("see? We have tons of this keyword in our
Sour grapes (Score:5, Insightful)
What are the options?
1. His site just never had enough incoming links to raise it in the rankings.
2. His site employed tricks to artificially raise its ranking and was penalized for this.
3. Google marked down his site for other reasons (competitive?)
Really, what is the most likely answer? For yet another price comparison website?
His site was probably marked down for linkspam. (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at the HTML source of Foundem [foundem.co.uk], you find a set of meta keywords usually associated with webspam sites. Then there's a big block of ad-like links - Ipods, plasma TVs,"cheap flights", "fitness equipment online", etc. It looks like your typical junk link site.
The Register reported their troubles with Google back in 2006. [theregister.co.uk] What they were bitching about was not that "Foundem" disappeared from Google, but that all the pages of "price comparisons" they put up were pushed way down in search results. They were also hit with an AdWords penalty. This was written up as a case study in SEO fail. [econsultancy.com]
However, at least they have a business address on the site.
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4. The algorithm had a bug which multiplied a few scores too high and it got fixed.
Monopolies and the purview of the FCC (Score:5, Insightful)
The FCC's original mandate was to govern allocation of broadcast spectrum; the naturally monopolistic tendencies of wired infrastructure (the need for eminent domain to build it, mostly) provides a reasonable justification for extending its purview to that as well.
But search engines are not natural monopolies. Anyone can come along, do it better than the other guys, and run off with their lunch money, so to speak. Just like Google did to all the search engines that they put out of business or pushed to the sidelines when they debuted. Sure, overturning a very popular brand like Google in the minds of users will be difficult, but that's mostly because Google is good enough for most people; if it sucked, people would be happy to try something new, and if a competitor search engine can't even carve out a little niche for itself to compete in, it obviously has nothing of significant benefit to offer.
And unlike the inevitable Microsoft comparison, switching away from Google to another search engine costs the users absolutely nothing, compared to not only the cost of acquiring an alternative operating system, but of learning it and changing over almost all of your apps which depend on it. If switching from Windows to Linux or OSX or BSD or what have you were as cheap and easy as switching from Google to Yahoo or vice versa, I suspect MS wouldn't have nearly the stranglehold it has on the operating system market.
Point being, there's absolutely no need to regulate search engines, because this is about one of the clearest examples of where the free market can handle itself best.
Article debunked here (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a good debunking of the article here [kedrosky.com]
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So is this entire thread. I don't see anyone who thinks its a good idea.
Why?? (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly
Lastly, there is NOTHING wrong with a biased search engine as long as the people using it understand the bias. Business, environmental, left wing, right wing, socialist, communist, capitalist and what-ever-ists might like to have a search engine that gives them results according to their political views. WHY does a search engine have to be non-biased?? Because this guy didn't follow the rules, was too lazy to fix it, and got hurt??? That's one of the reasons I think the Fairness doctrine is
Foundem is a SEARCH ENGINE. So I typed in 'price search engine'. Interestingly enough, Google was fourth on the list.....I couldn't find Foundem in the first 4 pages. Here are the meta tags on Foundem's home page ---
vertical search, price comparison, compare prices, flight search, hotel search, shop, buy, online, compare, best deals, best buy, prices, electronics, reviews, computers, job search, property search.
Wow ... no wonder they don't show up. They don't do anything UNIQUE. There are hundreds of companies doing the same thing. I guess they still haven't figured out how to get placement on a search engine.
Personally, I will discount this op-ed piece as little more than whining by some company too lazy to figure out what their market is, create a unique product, and spend the time and effort to get it to show up on Goggle's search engine. Lots of other companies do that just fine.....they must have skilled web staff working for them.
Or they figured if Google can't drive traffic to their web site, maybe the Times will. Seems the only advertising they want is 'free'.
New York Times hate Google as well (Score:2, Insightful)
The New York Times has also struggled with getting people to pay for their shit, and right now is part of an effort to bring pressure against Google anyway it can.
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There is little difference, and the point I was making was that as a business, it's all OK, provided they disclose editorial bias. If an information business is duplicitous and hides funding sources or biases, then that constitutes fraud, which should be illegal.
Too much money is involved (Score:2)
Good luck legislating this. When Microsoft can pay Verizon $500 million to install a Bing search icon on their phones there's bound to be lots of push back and lobbying efforts to make sure this does not happen. Truly "neutral" search will never be a reality unless there's some movement to disclose back room deals such as this. But that can't happen, at least not easily. And I'm not sure if it should.
At some point consumers of services have to be smart enough to look out for themselves. The government
Google maps and preferential search treatment? (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of this article is sour grapes.
The statement that Google Maps beat Mapquest because of preferential search treatment is hilarious. When google introduced the satellite view I recall reading (Wall street journal maybe?) that a mapquest executive had said he couldn't envision any need for the satellite view in a mapping service. (I just looked for the quote and couldn't find it. Too bad. Does this ring a bell with anyone? Bad as it sounded then, it sounds unbelievably idiotic now.) Mapquest just got beat by better technology.
Re:Google maps and preferential search treatment? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Google is the first and so far the only ones to do that
Google was the first to make it a production-quality feature, in 2007. On the other hand, Live Maps (now Bing Maps) had a publicly accessible demo of a similar thing in 2006 [bing.com] (the link in the article still works, but the UI is really painful to use).
Once Google released Street View, and it became quite a success, others have [bing.com] followed [yandex.ru], so it's not really the only one providing this. Their coverage is still superior, though.
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no piratical use
Call the RIAA! Finally, an internet application that can't be used for piracy!
How about "News Neutrality"? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Today, news media like New York Times, Fox News, CNN have become the news gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in dictating what news is prominently visible to the people means they are now an essential component of the society. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond freedom of the press (freedom to publish your own newspaper) and include news neutrality: the principle that news media should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance."
I don't think it will happen in my lifetime though.
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The BBC's news is legally obliged to be impartial [bbc.co.uk]. You can argue how successful it has been and how much more work it needs to do [bbc.co.uk]. But given that the right-wing parties say it has a liberal bias and the left-wing parties say it is too conservative; I'd say it is probably doing a good job of staying neutral.
So the advertisers become like lobbyists? (Score:2)
Why is this such a bad idea? (Score:2, Insightful)
I do not know about anyone else but i do not go about trying addresses in the address bar and hoping to get a relevant site. if it does not show up on the first page of google chances are I will never visit the web page.
But, from what I have seen google does not seen to do much censoring, so i am not really worried at this point.
and I would consider it important not to be censored from any part of the internet.
Not that they should not edit out th
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if it does not show up on the first page of google chances are I will never visit the web page.
it's the whole point, duh (Score:2)
Statism Masquerading as Net Neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
Government keep your paws off the Internet! (Score:3, Insightful)
If Google screws around, there are always rival search engines that would give you the content you are looking for.
The real danger is that the Government might tell Google and other search engines to filter out what the Government considers to be "dangerous information", "State Secrets", or other nonsense.
Basically, we are talking Search Censorship.
EFF and others should lobby hard against *any* government interference into how online services conduct their service. We can decide for ourselves if the Search Engines are being fair, and if not, we can launch new search engines and watch the big ones loose market share.
KEEP THE INTERNET FREE.
"neutral search engine" is an oxymoron. (Score:2)
You use a search engine to pair down listings based on arbitrary criteria, and you want those results to be relevant. This means intelligent algorithms which are by their nature non-neutral.
Given that the internet is 99% porn, I think its a very, very bad idea to ban such relevance sorting. I'm sure parents will be happy with their congressman after their kid enters "jupiter" for a science project and gets 10 pages of XXX to sort through.
NY Times Should Practice Some Net Neutrality (Score:2)
Another NY Times article that I won't be reading.
The concept of "neutrality" is best applied to things that tend to be natural monopolies, such as infrastructure, including high-speed internet connectivity.
Bah. Need to enforce NXDomain! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that Google will innovate/improve to keep that from happening, but it's not as if I don't have a choice between any search provider. OTOH -- I set that in my browser. Having the ISP (I'm looking at you, Charter) hijaack the NXDOMAIN to go to their own engine is causing me serious heartburn (especially since I'm trying to *telnet* to a valhalla.private address!
What about PageRank? (Score:2)
I heard that Google weighs certain websites it deems more valuable over others, in addition to the default weight given by the PageRank algorithm. Can anyone confirm this?
Maybe everything should be neutral (Score:2)
(when dying)
I want you to tell my wife, hello.
I don't want search neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
Why would I want search nutrality? I don't want all search engines to return essentially the same results. I want Bing to return more Microsoft-centric results, and I want Google to return Google-centric results. I want community-oriented search engines to return community-centric results, and I want product-oriented search engines to return product-centric results.
When I want MSDN documentation, I want to go to Bing, search for javascript, and get the msdn javascript reference -- above the mozilla one.
You know, like when you want a science book, you went to a science book store. And when you wanted a book by a british author, you called a british book store.
It's all a part of considering the source -- in all senses of the words. I don't want everything to be the same.
The only search engines that might vaguely (Score:2)
be reasonable to have search standards applied to them are the DNS NXDOMAIN search redirects, such as those used by comcast.
Since they are being forced upon their users, and those users are forced by regional monopolies to use that ISP.
Bing and Yahoo? (Score:2)
Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's new Bing have become the Internet's gatekeepers
To be an "internet gatekeeper," don't you need people to actually visit your site first?
Oh, search neutrality is important..guess for whom (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like a solution... (Score:2)
...looking for a problem.
ah that Nice Mr Murdoch (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Foundem is a UK site (foundem.co.uk) run by a UK company (Infederation Ltd).
Re: (Score:2)
Neutrality neutrality. Government cannot pass a law mandating neutrality.