Week 8: What to Do About Google?

What to Do About Google? | September 2013 | Communications of the ACM: "Calling Google an advisor cuts both ways: it gives Google both rights and duties. It gives a powerful argument against search neutrality: a law that puts Le Snoot back on top makes it more difficult for the user who wants a grilled cheese sandwich to get a decent meal. But just as readers would rightly be furious to discover the hotel concierge only recommended Le Snoot because the head chef slipped him an envelope stuffed with cash, search users would also have cause to complain if payola determined search rankings.

More than a decade ago, the FTC strongly warned search engines against displaying undisclosed paid listings.

All three theories capture something important about how search engines work. Each of them celebrates the contributions of one of the essential parties to a search. The conduit theory is all about websites with something to say, the advisor theory is all about the users who are interested in listening, and the editor theory is all about the search engine that connects them.

 But when it comes to crafting sensible law for search engines, our sympathies should lie with users. The Internet has made it easier to speak to worldwide audiences than ever before, but at the cost of massively increasing the cacophony confronting those audiences. Since users' interests are as diverse as human thought, they need highly personalized help in picking through the treasures in the Internet's vast but utterly disorganized storehouse.

The search engine is the only technology known to humanity capable of solving this problem at Internet scale.

Some familiar controversies about Google look rather different from this point of view. Take search bias. If Google is a conduit, bias is a serious problem; Google is setting up orange cones to block the highway and divert Internet users to the Google exit. If Google is an editor, bias is just as much a non-issue as when the front page of the Daily News promotes its own sports coverage rather than the Post's." 'via Blog this'