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A Very Simple Ethical Principle for Search: Google Fails Miserably

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mouser:
i think nudone might be onto something.
in fact you could even imagine a tool that specifically tried to "undo" the biases of these commercial search engines by penalizing sites with advertising from the search engine company, etc.

ie. imagine retrieving the ranked list of results from google, and then RE-RANKING by penalizing each page based on their relation to the search engine company.

very interesting idea.

Curt:
It can harm me to the extreme when I do a Google search for "some special words" only, and recieves just one or two relevant, but many many irrelevant, answers.


I May go with April (sorry! :-[ I couldn't help it) and say Scroogle
- maybe even Scroogle Scraper.

Cpilot:
Too much ado about nothing.
Making money is not inherently evil, and as it was pointed out before servers don't grow on trees and IT fairies don't come out at night to service them (although there could be some debate on that  :D).
If ads bother you ignore em.

superboyac:
You know what I realized just now while reading this thread?  I don't really use Google, or any search engine, anymore for actually searching for information.  Most of the time now, I pretty much know where I want to go and Google just helps me get there (if this is making any sense).  I rarely do blind searches, so to say, like where I type a word and just go.  And this may due to a combination of many reasons:

--I've used the internet so much now, that that initial curiosity I used to have is pretty much gone.  Now, I have a pretty good idea of where I want to go, and I ignore anything else in between.

--I have a "sense" of what is a legitimate link and what isn't.  I'm sure most of you do this too.  In the list of results, you can tell from a very quick glance which link is a good one, and which is junk.  Novice or uninformed users probably click on a lot of the crap, and that's one reason why most non-computer people get a lot of adware and spyware.  And then they go on to say how it's Windows' fault.  Not really, it's just that us powerusers can tell what we should and shouldn't click on.  But it's kind of hard to explain it.

--I'm a lot more busy now.  I have less time to click around and get distracted by random thought chains.  This is actually not that true, because if there was something really interesting, I'd probably take a couple minutes of my work day to check it out.  Honestly, I've run out of things to search for (randomly, that is).

--Trust.  Do I really trust anything out there?  Not really.  If I search for "best notepad alternative software", am I going to trust the slew of sites that get returned.  Probably not.  In those cases, I'd go straight to the source, like here (DC forum) where I trust the opinions of the people writing.  Is that Google's fault?  Not really.  How many people out there either know what they are talking about, or have unbiased (financially speaking, that is) opinions?  The internet has allowed anyone to put up any type of content unrestricted.  Even in real life, I don't trust too many people, and I go straight to the experts for answers to my questions.  So, in a sense, Google is just mimicking real life.

I have a feeling that no matter what happens, it will eventually be reduced to a pile of average-at-best junk, because the internet is going to represent society as a whole.  If you put everyone in the world in one place, and take an opinion, that opinion will be the average opinion, not the best or the most knowledgeable one.  So how can we avoid that?  We can't really.  It's up to me as an individual to filter through all that and find who I am looking for.

That's a little off topic, but let's get back down to the money issue.  People are making money participating in these broad, all-encompassing phenomena, like Google.  Well, again, I can't do anything about that, nor will I try.  If I could make money doing it, i would also.  I probably wouldn't be as successful because I have the desire to not let gimmicks ruin the quality of the product...but unfortunately, that might not necessarily be good for business.

There aren't a lot of people like you, mouser, who are so dedicated to providing quality content with your level of expertise without a concern financially.  You are indeed a very rare breed of person to do all this, pretty much for free.  We'd all like to think that if we were CEO's of multi-billion dollar companies, that we'd do it differently and with integrity.  But I can't say that.  Honestly, I don't what I would do because I can't even fathom myself in that situation.  I'm not afraid to say that I may turn out to be just as greedy or unethical as the worst ones.  I don't know what kind of pressures they deal with, so I can't say one way or the other.

Anyway, that's a couple of things that I was just thinking about while reading this thread.

mouser:
just a clarification: i don't pretend not to care about money -- my student loans make it impossible for me to last more than a few days a month without worrying about it.  i just don't think the goal of life is to get filthy rich; if i can find a way to make enough money to get by i'll be satisfied.  i get frustrated sometimes with how hard even that can be, and that's when i start getting upset when i see how hard it is for some of us to just get by, and how random or automatic it can be to accumulate money once you have enough of it - where it seems to grow overnight in the bank (much like my student loan debt grows when im not looking).

furthermore i don't really think google is doing bad stuff now.. i just look at the incentive system inherent in it, and the direction that is likely to pull things, and more and more i'm realizing what an gigantic potential conflict of interest it is to be selling ads to websites, and at the same time be the arbiter of deciding which websites to send people to.

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