[dreamfactory]

> what some bureaucrat has decided

That is precisely my point.

(And if you are looking for personalisation, an algorithm isn't necessarily counter to that but a global smack-ban on behaviours most certainly is.)

[nknighthb]

Government bureaucrat. I don't care if Google, Microsoft, or whoever else has humans who directly modify search results. I'm free to choose among the competing search engines based on the value they provide me.

Any external notion of correctness imposed industry-wide will destroy that choice.

[dreamfactory]

I wasn't talking about anyone outside google, just critiquing the game being rigged internally, but it's maybe interesting you brought that in.

On the one hand that could be criticised as an illusion of choice in the market (behind the curtain there is often ownership across entire industry sectors, regardless of 'competitors' within a sector). On the other, governments quite correctly get a say in any case (what do we representatively govern otherwise - the alternative is to cede governance to global corporations). Google is particularly sensitive to the latter as it has a huge de facto monopoly and has become part of our infrastructure - it is absolutely a huge target for regulation wherever it has traction.

Talking of competition, is there anything viable in the shape of an open source effort where the algorithms and indexes could be crowd-managed - perhaps indexing via browser plugins?