Google co-founder admits to discriminating against US content to improve search results
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2008-04-17 19:32
Google co-founder Sergy Brin, one of Google's most avid net neutrality proponents, candidly admitted today in Google's 1Q08 earnings call with investors, that Google "improved" its international search quality by "demoting non-country search results" on Google's improved country home pages.
This is interesting for a few reasons.
- First, Google has always publicly prided itself on not skewing search results based on their profit motive.
- They have said it was essential to maintaining user trust that the Google search algorithm deliver the best results for the user, not the best results for Google's profits.
- Second, in demoting "non-country" results on new and improved country home pages, the effect is largely to "demote" U.S. content relative to other international content, which proactively disadvantages U.S. content competitiveness.
- With a non-transparent "black box" tweak of the algorithm, U.S. content companies that had worked to appear high in the search results in other countries, were relegated to the latter pages in the results where no one would find them, lowering U.S. revenues of these U.S. content companies -- to enhance Google's profitability -- something Google claims not to do.
- Third, the FCC's net neutrality principles apply to Google --"consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers" -- and Google's discriminatory treatment of U.S. content clearly is not neutral.
- Google feels strongly that broadband providers should be neutral to all content, but Google is not neutral to content by its own admission, and Google's 60% market share of search is far greater than the market share of any broadband provider.
Bottomline: Google's net neutrality stance is not principled, it is simply a way of getting the Government to tilt the playing field to their advantage.
- Google is not net neutral; they admit to discriminating against content based on its origin.
Improved quality is consistent
Without reading Brin's comments exactly it's hard to tell, but from the bit you've given I don't see how this is inconsistent on Google's part, or bad for that matter.
Demoting (algorithmically) non-country domains seems perfectly logical if the effort is to increase quality of results. If I am searching for something - anything - I would much rather the result be from a US-based company than one from say, Korea or Germany. I'm sure the converse is also true. Moreover, a large segment of searches are local - some estimates are up to half! So... Why wouldn't users prefer more country specific results (i.e., perceive higher quality)?
Also - From the comments posted, I don't see the back up for asserting that Google is hurting American companies to enhance their own profitability.
Google has told us time and again that their primary mission is to provide the most relevant search results possible. In this they are quite consistent.
Lastly, any SEO worth his salt has known for years that to rank well in a foreign country, you should have a country specific domain and even host the site files on an in-country server. This is hardly breaking news - I suppose only that Brin is validating what we already knew.
I am not convinced, either, that neutrality applies to Google. The spirit of neutrality focuses on the "broadband deployment." It was never intended to dictate what content a search engine index and display.