[rbarooah]

I agree with you that Google should be free to have their own editorial voice, and it seems like a really bad idea for that to be interfered with directly by government.

However, as you have done, I often see this idea coupled with a quip like "If you don't like it, go find a new one."

Why do people keep saying this? It's clearly not a valid option. Doing fast, high quality search has gigantic barriers to entry. Some of these may literally be insurmountable because the data Google has archived from the past of the web will never be available to new entrants.

We simply don't have a range of search 'voices' to choose from. Telling people to choose from a range of options that doesn't exist solves nothing.

Personally, I think there's an argument for forcing Google to at least publicize that their search actually has an editorial voice to counteract the misleading idea that it was somehow algorithmically objective and free of bias, which was their position for many years.

At least that way consumers might question what they are seeing and recognize that it's not 'the web' but Google's opinion of what you should see.

[greglindahl]

I said that because I'm the CTO of a competitor (blekko) that some users think is a viable alternative.

It's true that we don't the bazillion clicks that google has logged. But google doesn't have our human curation, and brand new content on the Internet doesn't have a result click history yet.

[rbarooah]

I commend you for trying to offer an alternative, seriously!

Google may not have hand curation, but they do use manual raters as one of their signals.

It's also true that new content doesn't have a click history, but the click history as well as topological history of the internet can tell Google a lot more than just the history of individual items.

In any case, my main point here is that the position of competitors like yourselves would be strengthened if more people realized that Google wasn't somehow based on 'objective' algorithms.

You guys claim subjectivity and editorial quality as a strength and I agree that it is, but I think there's an argument that Google has been falsely advertising itself as objective and free of bias and could be forced to rectify that through advertising.

Indeed the reportage around this FTC settlement implies that Google has been 'cleared of allegations of bias', which is essentially the opposite of the truth.