Interesting. What regulatory framework *could* governments implement to limit growth? I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.

And here I was thinking search engines did what their CREATORS truly wanted them to do.

When the internet can read our minds, we will be redundant.

However huge Google may be, as long as nothing other than public choice acts to stamp out alternatives, it’s not being oppressive.

As soon as some “tough on abortion, tough on the causes of abortion” nutjob gets in, poof, lots of info on family planning and contraceptives would magically disappear. And once you have a state-sanctioned player, all the others can automatically be blocked by school networks, libraries etc, making them pretty much irrelevant (or worse).

If you don’t like Google, by all mean build an open-source replacement… but stay clear of government for anything, especially for funding.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, this is one of them.

If you’re suggesting an open-source noncommercial search engine, similar to Firefox or Wikipedia, then full steam ahead! But if you’re saying we need a Ministry of Truth controlling internet search–uh, no.

State control is a poor substitute for freedom when it comes to information. Democracy is no good here, either; why should the majority control what the minority sees?

Google won’t last forever, and whomever replaces them will be clever and also opaque. No organization, public or private, will ever wield that power kindly and selflessly.

A more appropriate role for government would be creating some rules about transparency and neutrality.

Take off the Google goggles and try other search engines, and search engine aggregators like Dogpile. Or build your own, as has been suggested. But don’t try and herd the search cats, it will annoy them and ultimately you.

I think one of the flaws in the argument pitched is that search rank makes or breaks companies. It does, but if you were naive enough to build your business plan around search rank, you deserve to be broken.

As ever with standards, getting buy-in is the hard part.

That makes perfect sense to me.

OTOH, I don’t know any “big transparent public entities” that have enough money to run a google-size server farm. That solution sounds not so good.

-Chris Allison

When someone says “The People,” that’s usually code for “The Government.” You also mention “public entities” as opposed to “private concerns. What exactly do you have in mind?

The reason they don’t do this is to prevent spammers gaming the system. They keep it secret so they can keep the spam out of the top 10 as much as possible to give you the results you want, not the results the spammers want to feed you.

I’m not saying I disagree, sadly, but wow, what a admittance of the failure of democracy…

So basically, people, you’d rather trust a capitalist corporate entity (which some argue exhibit psychopathic behavior), rather than your own democratically controlled government.

I’m not saying I disagree, sadly, but wow, what a admittance of the failure of democracy…

I don’t trust A capitalist entity over my government, but I do trust a pile of them who are busy slitting each other throats over my government. There is a fundamental difference between a democratic government and a functioning market. I don’t choose my government, but, if the market is working properly, I do choose my corporation.

Democratically elected governments don’t reflect the best choice for you. It reflects the best choice as judged by the majority after some sort of weeding process. You can rest assure that when Bush was elected… TWICE, that did not represent my choice. I don’t think that just because he did (or did not) get a majority vote that he must be the best guy to lead. We let him lead because democracy is a game used to pick a leader that the people with guns agreed to play. We let him continue to lead because we would rather let a game determine the leader and have everyone just accept it rather than breaking out into a civil war every time two presidents/PMs/whatever split nearly 50/50 on who would make the best el presidante. If I thought that Bush or Obama were horrible rulers I don’t want to live under, my two choices would be a futile rebellion likely to leave me dead or in jail, or leave the country.

Now, in a functioning market, things are much different. I might think that Google is horrible and a super majority of the planet could disagree with me. Yet thankfully, their opinion doesn’t matter. I can ignore the ‘democratic’ opinion of everyone else and take my business to Yahoo. It is like if after Bush won, I was like “fuck that, Kerry is my president” and I just lived under his rule while everyone else went on living under Bush. In a functioning market your every decision is a choice among many options, with all the other idiots not being able to coerce you into following them. In a perfect democracy on the other hand, it just takes 51% of the people to think your opinion is wrong, and the other 49% have to live with it.

I am not saying that in practice markets always work out shinny, and I am not suggesting that government is always evil. I am saying that when you have a functioning market, one where there is lots of choice, it is easy to switch companies, and one company isn’t crippling the others unfairly, a market beats the piss out of democracy.

The search engine market is a great example of a place where a functioning market (which we have) rocks the shit out of democracy. There is lots of competition, changing search engines is free, utterly without hurdles, and none of the companies are doing anything to sabotage the other other than to build better search engines. If you think Google’s editorial review sucks… spend 2 seconds typing in another search engine into your web browser and go somewhere.

There is place where rule by majority makes sense. Search engines that control my information pipe is not one of them. Rule by individual choice is clearly the better option here.

When someone says “The People,” that’s usually code for “The Government.”

… HUH? Is this some sort of weird American quirk? Whenever I see “the People” it’s almost always directly in CONTRAST with “The Government”. It’s often either an anarchist or a libertarian rallying cry, but collectivism tends to use it too.

“We, the People” doesn’t mean “the government” – it means the people who elected the government.

You also mention “public entities” as opposed to “private concerns”. What exactly do you have in mind?

I would expect (from Cory) something like not-for-profit organizations, open-source swarms, or the like.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001224.html

concluding that “… if Google, for whatever reason, decided to remove you from its search results, your website no longer exists.”

I’d love to see a distributed search engine, but the “if you build it, they will abuse it” rule means that from Day One such a thing would be under massive assault from spammers. Making it resilient enough to withstand this would be a real trick, and saying that ‘peer review’ will take care of the problem is overoptimistic when most of the ‘peers’ contributing to the index are likely to be infected Windows PCs controlled by a botmaster in Moscow.

Ultimately, it comes down to trust. I trust Google (to some degree) because their interests are at least partly aligned with my own: their interest lies in delivering useful and ‘clean’ results so that I’ll keep using their site. A distributed search engine I can trust must also derive its data and behavior from people who don’t have a vested interest in lying to me. That starts to sound like a call for a web-of-trust approach. I don’t trust a million strangers, but I trust my friends and, to a lesser extent, their friends, and so on.

Yes. Google would go bankrupt if people chose to stop using it. When our “democratically controlled government” is told clearly to do things like stop the war by a majority of voting citizens (as in 2006, 2008)…nothing happens.

We don’t have the choice to withdraw our own money from the war–I’ve never supported it but have paid thousands of dollars into it. We do have a choice about where our money goes in the market.

I would argue that the market, not the state, reflects the will of the people. The state reflects the will of whoever gives the most money to politicians. Market institutions (including voluntary nonprofits) must serve their customers/donors or disappear.

Democracy is way, way overrated. In America, half the people don’t believe in evolution and are waiting for the Second Coming. Yeah, let’s base public policy on that.

I have to think you have something in mind a non-profit organization funded by international NGOs with a peer-reviewed and publicly available search algorithm.

Or perhaps an open-source project funded by a foundation?

But please, please tell me you don’t mean “public” in the sense of government owned, controlled and monitored. I think I’d rather share my search history with advertisers.

I guess it wasn’t clear just what you were suggesting as an alternative. “Public control” is nearly always means government control.

Like many people here (and not unlike Cory), I am a liberal who thinks that the free market will probably continue to do a good job bringing us useful search engines.

But as Clay Shirky would remind us, a search engine can be built collaboratively “out of love” rather than for profit (This would arguably make it even better), and then compete with the older for-profit search engines (as has happened with operating systems, online encyclopediae, text-editing and image-editing software, etc).

Being angry or afraid because Google now “wields too much power” makes no sense – we voted for them yesterday, and we’ll vote for them again tomorrow.