17 Dec 2008
Google to ‘ditch neutrality’?
There’s a piece on Brand Republic published yesterday:
“NEW YORK - Google has denied that it is working on a plan to speed up the delivery of its own content, which could end the way that all traffic on the internet is treated the same.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal Google has approached cable and phone companies in the US with a proposal to create a fast lane — for its own content.”
The subject of ‘net neutrality’ (as far as I understand it, the principle that all the lanes of the information superhighway travel at the same speed, without a class system) is complex, and potentially a very big issue indeed for the future online landscape.
But as for the general principle of Google’s ‘neutrality’ as far as the services it delivers to consumers, excuse me while I utter a hollow laugh of epic proportions.
I’m old and ugly enough to remember the prognoses for the internet in 1995, when search engines like Alta Vista and Lycos were the new stars (alongside AOL). The soothsayers and prophesy merchants were keen to tell us all that the search engines would inherit the earth (and, for once, the seers were right).
The burning question was this: how can you monetize the traffic on your search engine without losing objectivity; because surely the traffic and the objectivity of search results were inextricably geared to each other. With hindsight it seems that these qualms were overestimating the intelligence of the US (and perhaps global) public…
So, a few years later, in the late ‘90s, GoTo/Overture invented key-phrase driven paid search, Google ‘borrowed’ the idea a year or so after that, and the rest is corporate history.
Did the masses desert Google once a commercial auction started to determine the content of the results pages? Did they hell! Quality Score be damned, the reality is that – for a lot of key vertical sectors like finance in particular - the paid results often delivered (thanks to the realities of the digitally-enabled open market) more relevant results than the affiliate dominated ‘natural’ search results on the left hand site of the page.
So, would Google ‘ditching neutrality’ be a worthy news story? Do me a favour, the concept of neutrality being the life blood of a search engine died in about 2000.
And as a footnote: I’m struggling to marry up the word “Google” and the phrase “its own content”… Not last time I looked it isn’t. Any of it.
