Search Neutrality?
December 29th, 2009
Yesterday’s New York Times carried an op-ed piece entitled, Search, But You May Not Find. I’m always interested by op-eds that focus on marketing and tech issues rather than political and social issues, and this one was no exception.
The piece, written by Adam Raff, co-founder of U.K. price comparison site Foundem, proposes the notion of “search neutrality.”
What is search neutrality? Well, according to Adam, it’s “the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.”
I’m more of a veteran generalist, not a hardcore search guy, and I realize that the question of Google’s search results being less than 100 percent objective is old news, but that principle struck me as something worth examining.
Comprehensive — Well, according to Internet Systems Consortium, the number of active domains is increasing at a staggering rate, nearly 100 million annually. Does the notion of “search neutrality” suggest some sort of legislation mandating that any given search engine, whether Google or Bing or Yahoo!, absolutely keep up with this explosive growth? And if not absolute, if only 99 percent of those 100 million domains get indexed, well, that’s a million domains slipping through the cracks. Does indexing 99 percent of available domains constitute “comprehensive”? Does not indexing one million available domains constitute “comprehensive”?
Impartial and based solely on relevance — This is where the idea that a search engine should have “no editorial policies” falls apart. Just what constitutes “relevance”? What’s relevant to one person may be entirely irrelevant to another. And isn’t that what all search engines struggle with all the time, trying to produce results that are highly relevant to the greatest number of people? Search engines display results based on complex algorithms, but those very algorithms constitute an editorial judgment, a decision to weigh this factor a little more heavily than that factor. By their very nature and existence, they are editorial policies.
So what’s Adam’s op-ed really all about? Well, a bit of searching (ironically?) produces an eConsultancy piece titled, A Study In SEO Fail. If you found yesterday’s op-ed interesting, it’s a must-read that indicates the Times was punk’d into printing a tech exec’s petulant rant. Paul Kedrosky over on InfectiousGreed seems to agree.
It’s hard not to, though, when, on the one hand, the op-ed is complaining that Foundem “was effectively ‘disappeared’ from the Internet” by Google, but on the other hand, a Google search indicates about 54,700 Foundem pages.
If you want to learn more about search neutrality (at least the way Foundem sees it) check out the Foundem’s Google Story page on searchneutrality.org — self-described as “a Foundem initiative.”
Meanwhile, even as newspapers are dying left and right, the Times op-ed page remains an important piece of press real estate. When they run a piece like this, though, the message seems clear: Stick to political and social issues and leave the tech and Web opining to others.