I've said it a couple of times. Google (with others like Facebook, Apple) is so big, its essentially infrastructure, and needs to be regulated.
That's been obvious for the better part of a decade now. People will scream bloody murder, and not without good cause, but it's either going to happen, or there's no point in even pretending to regulate public utility monopolies.
Google is neither a public utility, nor a monopoly. You can always use one of dozens of other search engines. In fact, if you felt that Google was so bad, you can simply suggest others do so as well. Why does the government need to get in there and make Google the exact search engine you want, rather than the search engine that, clearly, the bulk of their customers want?
I'm not making the case for regulation. I'm just saying that it will be made, and when it is, it will be hard to argue against because of actions like this one.
You can always use one of dozens of other search engines.
That won't help Google any more than it helped Microsoft.
> That won't help Google any more than it helped Microsoft.
I'd love to see the comparison as to how Microsoft's strong-arming of VARs to sell only their products and Google's penalizing RG for attempting to subvert their search engine rankings relate.
I'm pretty sure the EU is itching to start regulating Google in Europe, but to do that they'll need to find a point of leverage somewhere and so far that's been hard to find.
Put another way: exactly what about Google could they (practically) regulate and will have sufficient public support?
In essence the problem tis about Google being able to wield disproportionate power through it's rankings and our common sense telling us that they will eventually abuse this if left unchecked; but that they aren't abusing this too blatantly just yet.
Not that that's of any help for people like my friend who ran a (handwritten) long tail content generation company which worked hard to stay within Google's guidelines yet had the company he and 3 friends had worked on for 4 years destroyed overnight just months ago when someone at Google decided they didn't like the content and penalized every single one of his clients.
Actually, one could argue they already are abusing it and are doing so with increasing frequency.
They've been tailoring search results to cut out the specialized aggregators, like including their own shopping results above other stores.
The obvious one you've probably seen recently is movies. They now show the actors, related films and rankings, depriving views and ad space from the sites that offered that information.
They've also been doing it with maps for years for search terms like 'x in y city' as well as entering the ratings business. This content is often poor, but I imagine every click into an aggregator is a loss to google as the ad spend potentially goes on that aggregator instead of google.
You could see all of these are attempting to circumvent other businesses and abusing their monopoly. But I imagine none of these businesses want to complain as to be shut out of Google on the internet is death. You can't tell google to not steal your content, without telling them to not list your content.
They seem to justify it with claims that they're just giving searchers what they want, but in the end they own the highways, and now they seem to be putting their own facades up in front of a significant number of the businesses along the highway too which means they have to advertise on google just to get above google's own internal adverts.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but actual search results often seem to appear a very, very long way down the page on a lot of terms these days.
I like the customized search results. They're more often than not helpful to me.
If I want the weather in a city I'm visiting, why wouldn't I want it on the google page, instead of another click away?
The rest of the Internet has no natural right to views and clicks sent their way from google. If google gives users the best search results (among the more than half-dozen credible search engines), users will use them. Do enough hostile things to users and users will go elsewhere. If their competition improves while they stay stagnant, they will also start to lose market share.
Google is improving Google's offering. That's laudable, because it helps Google's users and Google's financials.
You can bet anything that Google is A/B testing revenue each time it does an index/penguin/panda update. All you need to do is compare Adwords revenue from Google owned sites versus partner sites to see what is happening.
That's been obvious for the better part of a decade now. People will scream bloody murder, and not without good cause, but it's either going to happen, or there's no point in even pretending to regulate public utility monopolies.