[governance] Halal Search Engine

[Ian Peter]

Couldn't agree more, Lisa.

To this need for transparency I would add the need to ensure that no search
engine is assisted to monopolise the space by a variety of anti-competitive
measures. These might include

* bundling with operating systems
* mobile phone deals for special search links
* carrier preferred supplier deals

I am sure there are many more - and I'm not yet convinced that user choice
will be all that strong a factor in determining which search engines (with
accompanying biases) people use.




On 7/09/09 6:37 PM, "Lisa Horner" <lisa at global-partners.co.uk> wrote:

> Hi
> 
> I think what's important here is the principle of transparency.  As long
> as gatekeepers of information (such as search engines) are transparent
> about how they select content, including political, economic, cultural
> etc criteria, it's not necessarily a problem. Transparency needs to be
> coupled with "media literacy" amongst users.  They need to know that
> information presented to them can be affected by the values and bias of
> gatekeepers, and know how to find out about it and navigate around
> information to find what they need.  Whilst the medium is very
> different, the issues are similar to newspapers and broadcasters having
> political bias.
> 
> Lisa
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Milton L Mueller [mailto:mueller at syr.edu]
> Sent: 06 September 2009 22:59
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Ian Peter; Avri Doria
> Subject: RE: [governance] Halal Search Engine
> 
> 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 ;-)
> 
>> -----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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