Google’s Business Myth: Fair Searching

By Andrew at March 26th, 2010.

Search neutrality and net neutrality often get confused by the relative few people who care about them. In a recent WSJ opinion piece about Google and its archrivals, including AT&T and Verizon, the companies say that they’ve achieved “common ground” on the issue of net neutrality.

That’s corporate-speak about the contentious issue of net neutrality, basically meaning the rules that make all Internet providers handle traffic equally. “Common ground” usually means they’ve found a way to carve up the profits, but not necessarily to the advantage of consumers.

In a moment of candor, Verizon spilled the beans about net neutrality. It said, “It is no mystery, after all, why dominant Internet incumbents such as Google are among the strongest proponents of net neutrality rules – their incentive is to lock in place through regulation advantages they have established for themselves based on today’s predominant business models.”

AT&T also piled on Google, saying it has “an entrenched market share of greater than 70 percent of the search market — [and] shapes how consumers actually experience the Internet more than any given broadband provider possibly could.” [emphasis added]

In short, Google is huge and is committed to getting larger than Godzilla committing mayhem in downtown Tokyo.

When AT&T talked about Google – whose share is closer to 80% than 70% — “shapes how consumers experience the Internet” it said a mouthful.

And that brings us back to search neutrality, referring to the way Google is supposed to rank links in searches. Google doesn’t want the FCC to regulate the way it ranks.

It prefers to control that mysterious process all by itself. It claims it uses algorithms to rank information. But some critics claim those mathematical algorithms (formulas) must be dumb as doorknobs.

Why is that? The main reason is that Google’s algorithms, if they even exist, present more misinformation than information. Google doesn’t distinguish between people who say they’ve seen “Bigfoot” and those who know that Bigfoot is a myth.

Google needs to teach those mysterious algorithms to distinguish truth from fiction. Until then, its role as an “information provider” is itself at least partly a myth.