[tantalor]

Is it fair to call a utility what you pay nothing for?

[Slansitartop]

Yes. Google, as literally the main portal to all online information for nearly everyone who isn't in China, has a moral obligation to do a good, impartial job. If it wants to fail at that in order to serve its financial interests, then it ought to be quickly broken up into a million pieces.

[oh_sigh]

Except the switching cost is essentially 0: just type Bing or Yahoo into the address bar

[AlphaSite]

Switching cost for the searcher, not the websites. They have zero recourse.

[oh_sigh]

I'm not sure what you mean...put googlebot in your robots.txt then?

[rtkwe]

Except if you don't exist on Google you don't exist at all for ~75% of searchers. That's what I'm thinking the person was saying.

[AlphaSite]

yes.