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A Very Simple Ethical Principle for Search: Google Fails Miserably

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mouser:
I'd like to suggest an extremely simple principle..

Shouldn't we want a web search engine which doesn't have huge financial (or other) incentives to send people to certain pages?

I mean, it sounds insanely obvious and yet the #1 search engine on the planet, by far, has it's entire business model based on people visiting pages with its ads on it, and is increasingly creating content and services that it benefits from sending traffic to.

I would concede that Google is one of the more ethical giant corporations around, but that isn't saying all that much.

Don't we need to find and switch to search engines which don't have such an overwhelming financial incentive to send us to their pages and pages of people that pay them?  Is that even possible in this world?

note: one of my oldest friends and someone who has more integrity than anyone i know works for google; this isn't really a knock against what google is currently doing as much as it is a comment about what i view as an inherent and unacceptable situation in search.

f0dder:
It's a nice idea, but I'm afraid it won't happen - indexing, storing, searching takes a lot of server capacity, which I doubt anybody is going to donate just because it's a nice idea... at least google is (still) one of the lesser evils.

Lashiec:
I don't think this is going to change in the future. You see, ads are the only mean of revenue for Google. That's fine, and lots of companies usually do the same. Of course, when you deal with such a big company it's not exactly the same situation. One thing is clicking Google Ads and tolerating sponsored links between the actual searches, but a complete different thing is people at Google being lazy (in my opinion) and letting SEOs alter completely the search results, favoring commercial sites, "collective" sites (the ones that contain reviews of products, and are constantly plaguing every single search you do containing the word "review") and crap sites, who link one to another to another in an endless loop. Of course, Google is not whole responsible for this, but they couldn't do some changes to their algorithms to enhance the results.

What's not acceptable is the current state with Google Ads. It's been researched that most of the ads are pure crap who links to illegal sites, like some ones selling you freeware programs (do a search on "Firefox"). This is completely unacceptable. Google had been informed of this, and it's not clear if they did something or not. The recent purchase of DoubleClick, the tracking cookie kings worries me even more.

Another day we'll discuss the Google cookie... For now, I'll suggest Ixquick, which doesn't store any information about yourself, and works fine. Or maybe we should go back to Altavista... at least Babelfish it's essential to me ;D

Just my two cents.

mouser:
you know what would be a cool idea, have a kind of organization which collects a little bit of money from everyone and then funds major infrastructure projects like this, which are dedicated to serving the people, rather than turning a giant profit.. hmm it's an interesting idea.. we could even elect representatives to this crazy organization which would represent us..  if only there were such organizations in this world..

app103:
At one time it could have been possible.

In the beginning, when Google was a university project, there were no ads...but it wasn't making any money either.

Back in the days of dialup and ISP's like AOL not wanting to run their own inferior search engines, ones like Google could make their money by selling search services to ISP's. (and they did...and Google still does with AOL)

But as time went on and these dialup companies cut costs & services, or just disappeared, it became harder to sell search services.

I think the only way Google could be able to get away from shoving their ads down our throats is if they start charging us...making Google a subscription based search engine.

Are you willing to pay a monthly fee for using an ad free Google? I think most people wouldn't.

Way back before Google became as big and well known as they are today, companies like Copernic could sell a search application that would use various smaller sources to find what you were looking for...and it was quite good, considering what else was available at the time, so people gladly paid for it. But even Copernic knows that people don't want to pay for a search engine any more and have changed to desktop search, selling the licensing for their tools to companies like AOL.

To have what you want, ad free results, some government would have to step in and run a search engine supported by tax dollars. And I, for one, don't want the government involved in deciding what results I can and can't have (and making it super easy for them to track my online activities).

I'd rather have Google just the way it is now...ads, flaws & all...for free, than that.

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