[governance] Halal Search Engine

[Parminder]

Milton L Mueller wrote:
> You can pay to be listed in the CLEARLY MARKED and SEPARATED sponsored links, which in fact attract far fewer clicks than the regular ones. Google was the first to clearly separate them and NOT make their regular rankings depend in any way on payments, and that of course is why it won the market - it really was better for finding what you were looking for than the alternatives. That set the standard for Bing, which is actually a very good competitor now if you haven't tried it. All hail market competition! What a friend we have in....Mammon!! Genuflect to Market FUNDAMENTALISM ;-)
>   

Since i just need to respond to any words that Milton says on Market 
fundamentalism :), here it is:

It is really not so 'CLEARLY MARKED and SEPARATED'. It started with a 
small box on the left side with a different background color. Not it has 
migrated right to the top of 'search results', in the same font, color 
and background, and is so prominent that it blocks two third of my 
browser view. So watch out for what happens next as market power of 
Google increases further, and regulatory powers dont take off because of 
a host of structural reasons.

Worse, Google carries out, what has been called an extortion racket, to 
sell advertised space to rivals of any brand that gets looked up by a 
user in the search engine. So if you search for 'sony cameras' the top 
advertised positions are auctioned out, and of course if sony is 
interested in not having users carried to the websites of their rivals 
when what they really came looking for is 'sony', it can still pay a 
higher price that the rivals to also get the ad space.... Really, some 
competition this.

Parminder
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Ian Peter [mailto:ian.peter at ianpeter.com]
>> Sent: Sunday, September 06, 2009 3:52 PM
>> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Avri Doria
>> Subject: Re: [governance] Halal Search Engine
>>
>> ( a couple of people disputed this)
>>
>> The most obvious example is that on any common Google search the first few
>> results that come through may be sponsored links - identified as such if
>> you
>> have good eyes and bother to look, but the first results nevertheless. You
>> can pay to be number one on a Google search results listing, that's the
>> bottom line.
>>
>> Beyond that - because Google doesn't release its algorithms this is
>> unproven. But articles such as this http://www.seobook.com/google-branding
>> do tend to suggest new factors coming into results.
>>
>>     
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