You make a compelling argument that Google is biased against new entrants into market(s).
How are people supposed to know about these products/services if Google is showing what people already like? i.e. incumbents. They are forced to buy ads!
This is just one example why it's so important to show "neutral" results to everyone. The good news is that politicians like Warren understand these issues. Regulation and possibly break-ups are coming.
Relying on corporations to be the arbiter of fairness is dangerous. I certainly welcome the new progressive agenda of regulation to keep markets free and fair.
The disingenuous bit here, is that they are not technically censoring, in the traditional sense. Instead, what Google/YouTube and others are doing are manipulating discovery/virality for their own ends.
As shown in Manufacturing Consent governments and powerful organizations can get the effect of censorship by manipulating visibility. A social climate where virality essentially belongs to just one political faction is dangerous. It would be the 1950's equivalent of only Republicans getting to appear on TV and radio.
People make web pages. Web pages link to each other. Page Rank finds out how important a page is, based on links to it from other important pages.
That idea is probably at the core of all modern Search Engines (including DDG).
Thus, all modern Search Engines (including DDG) are almost certainly based upon user activity. That being the users who build web pages and links to them.
Correct. I guess I wasn't clear. I'm talking about the personalizing of search results based upon search history, search terms, personally and in aggregate. Not based upon the structure of the web itself.
Search engines could bias towards our preferences as consumers if they weren't a monopoly and didn't sell/place ads in the search results.
That's the problem with Google and I think we're too far down this path for them to fix it. We've been watching this slow walk to where they are for a long time and I think people have just become to used to it to notice how insidious the situation has become.
Is the company biased towards their interest or towards the customer's?
If Google was simply a provider of information then the answer would be that those are one and the same. But they obviously are not. One conflict that already provides an irreconcilable conflict of interest is the fact that they are primarily an advertising company - and the world's largest one at that. There are countless other issues that could also be brought up to emphasize conflicts of interest, but that's not really necessary. That their primary business is selling advertisements creates too large of a conflict of interest to ever expect "customized" search results to be anything but manipulative.
How are people supposed to know about these products/services if Google is showing what people already like? i.e. incumbents. They are forced to buy ads!
This is just one example why it's so important to show "neutral" results to everyone. The good news is that politicians like Warren understand these issues. Regulation and possibly break-ups are coming.