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« Last post by mouser on July 03, 2007, 10:31 AM »
Your points about google are well taken.
Let's not get into debate about michael moore since it could lead to loong political discussions, and i really wasn't trying to say anything about whether i approved of his stuff or not, and i don't think it's relevant.
As you say, right not the pressure keeping google from really slanting results to favor sites showing adsense is just that if they bias the results *too much* in this way, people will start using other search engines. so there are ecological pressures on them to present good results, and they seem to take that seriously.
On the other hand it seems to me that each year, and as they become more domineat, they discard a little more of their ethics and go a little bit farther in the direction of pushing their ads.
I think your points about scarcity of resources are good -- the key dilemna here is that if you only have a certain amount of space on the top results page, or a certain # of movie theatres, who decides what gets shown. For movie theatres, this is probably usually based on what movies will bring in the most money, though there are also other things like contractual obligations to theatres, etc. For search engines.. it's a combination of wanting to send people to advertisers so you can really make money, vs. presenting useful results to the user so they come back and use you again. I guess this is where my anti-capitalism inclinations come through -- there are just some things that i don't want to be driven by forces which seek to maximize profits.
However, I do think that the scale of this problem is relatively minor, because as we have both acknowledged, there is also a very high pressure on any search engine to return useful results, and if any search engine really went too far in pushing irrelevant advertising above useful content, people would switch away. And as long as that is the case, i do think this problem is relatively minor. As long as the "cost" of switching to a new search engine is low enough, and as long as it isn't prohibitively expensive to compete with google in terms of ability to index the web (this might be a real impediment though), then there will be alternatives to choose from and this will keep google from becoming too evil i suppose.
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