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Adam Raff, a founder of Foundem, an Internet technology firm, makes the case in today’s New York Times for “Search Engine Neutrality,” which is kind of like network neutrality except that the nondiscrimination policy would apply to the way search engines return their results. As Raff states it, search neutrality means that “search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.” He objects, for example, to Google favoring its own map service over competing map services. And he objects to the way Google down-ranked his company’s product comparison service, which, he says, severely impacted its business.

Many of the points Raff makes are versions of thoughts in Chapter 4 of Blown to Bits, where we discuss the distorting lens phenomenon and an extreme case of search oblivion at the hands of Google’s ranking. (We also make the point, as Raff notes, that some of Google’s keyword auction technology was the invention not of Google but of Overture.)

But can search “impartiality” and “relevance” really be defined statutorily? I doubt it, or rather, I doubt we would want the hash that Congress or a regulatory bureaucracy would make of an attempt to regulate the semantics of the entire English language (and not just English). And lots of things affect Google’s rankings –see the Webmaster Help page, which includes advice such as not creating pages with little or no original content. I don’t think we want a legal entity judging whether pages were downranked for these or other reasons, or whether Google’s Safe Search filter has improperly omitted someone’s web page entirely.

In the presence of competition, none of this would be a worry. People would choose a search engine based on whether they liked the results it delivered, or perhaps on the basis of quality ratings by an organization such as Consumers Report. They could move if the search company changed their policy. The same is true with net neutrality, actually — the demand would not be so compelling if the number of choices of Internet services were not limited to one or two in so many places.

Monopolies are always dangerous, and this op-ed drives home that point. Not sure I am persuaded about the remedy, though.

Note: Any account written by an agent of a company unhappy about where its name turns up in Google searches should be regarded skeptically. There are lots of possible reasons for Google to downrank a site that have nothing to do with Google trying to gain an advantage in a new business sector, and Foundem’s web page design certainly doesn’t dazzle. Would love to know the full facts here, but I don’t.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 28th, 2009 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Censorship and free speech, Search, The Internet and the Web, The role of government—laws and regulations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.