[spyrosk]

I wonder what would happen if google dropped facebook from their search results in retaliation. At least for tech-savvy users it won't pose a problem, but for the rest it will cause major problems (e.g. the RWW article). Will it be legal though?

[swombat]

Google can't do that. They'd get sued under anti-trust laws for serious money.

Edit: Seriously. Tweaking your search algorithms to the detriment of some providers and to the benefit of others is one thing (that Google does now, and which they won't be sued for). Deliberately removing a direct competitor with as high a profile (and deep pockets) as Facebook is a different kettle of fish.

Google owns 84% of the search market globally (http://marketshare.hitslink.com/search-engine-market-share.a...). That is considered a monopoly as far as Anti-Trust laws are concerned.

[gnaritas]

A company the size of Google isn't afraid of a lawsuit, nor has it been established that the search market is something those laws apply to; Google has plenty of room to do whatever they want with their search results including banning Facebook. They can say the same thing Facebook did, they're our competitors and they're stealing our customers.

[jbrechtel]

I'd argue that Google would be terribly afraid of a lawsuit that might establish that the search market is something those laws apply to.

[recoiledsnake]

The reason they won't is that so far Google hasn't overtly manipulated results(not in a highly publicized way atleast) and that's why there is a lot of trust on them. Once it's proved that they're doing this, it's legitimacy will go down big time. Bing can trumpet that Google doesn't show any results for THE social networking site etc.

[IChrisI]

> Deliberately removing a direct competitor with as high a profile (and deep pockets) as [...] is a different kettle of fish.

I realize Google couldn't ban Facebook, and that they'd be sued for that, but I do find it funny that the opposite is completely okay. Is Facebook not trying to become a monopoly ad provider on its own site?

[rbarooah]

Are you suggesting that we shouldn't have the right to decide what ads get shown on our own websites?

[Daniel14]

Are you suggesting that we shouldn't have the right to decide what links get shown on our own websites?

[rbarooah]

Not at all. If google wants to they should go ahead and delist Facebook.

[recoiledsnake]

Apples and oranges.

Google is a search site and purports to have close to every publicly available(i.e not banned in robots.txt) page indexed. Delisting a very popular site(will be doing that for the first time) will get it into the news for the wrong reasons. And how much will it hurt Facebook? Barely. How many people signup for Facebook that searched "Best social networking site" ? It will actually hurt them monetarily so it will be hard to sell to stockholders. I see almost zero chance of this happening.

On the other hand, Facebook's value is not in showing ads, it's about social networking. How will removing Google ads hurt it? Will it kill off enough FB applications for people to take notice and leave FB for... what? Orkut? Google Go? Myspace?

After all, the FB applications use Facebook's resources, so they want to indirectly charge them for it while making money.

[true_religion]

Indexed is not the same thing as available, or else Google would not be able to tweak their algorithm against so-called spam networks like Demand Media.

Historically, Yahoo trumped itself as having the best search results thanks to human curation of its search directory. Bing, even today, labels itself as a "decision engine".

Google as far as I know has no public statements implying that there's a 1:1 correspondence between the set of possible Google results for all queries and the internet. This relationship is far more important than merely a 1:1 between index and internet.

[spyrosk]

Seriously. Tweaking your search algorithms to the detriment of some providers and to the benefit of others is one thing (that Google does now, and which they won't be sued for). Deliberately removing a direct competitor with as high a profile (and deep pockets) as Facebook is a different kettle of fish.

Ok, I can understand that. So, what if all results from *.facebook.com were moved after the first few pages of google's results for the relevant search terms?

Would that be enough for an antitrust lawsuit?

As for the target group of users we are discussing, it would have virtually the same results.

[notahacker]

Removing Facebook from searches for Facebook or people's names wouldn't just invite investigation, it would damage Google's credibility as a search engine. Penalising the Facebook content farm consisting of Wikipedia articles plus lists of fans would probably be a net positive though.

[spyrosk]

In the post you replied to I said that google could manipulate the search results to change facebook's pagerank, not dropping them entirely. Just so that results from the domain appear on the second or third page.

[audeyisaacs]

What if they put buzz(or orkut) as the first 'sponsored' result?

[statictype]

Even if it is legal, Google won't do it. Their power comes from having a search engine and index that reaches across the internet. They simply won't drop Facebook from it unless they have an completely legitimate reason (I believe BMW or one of the other high-end car brands were temporarily banned for shady SEO tactics).

Similarly in the mobile space, even though Google is in head-on competition with Apple, they still develop iphone-optimized versions of their apps. That's just good business.

Just the same way Microsoft won't make Google/Apple products not work on Windows.

[random42]

Apple makes/made softwares/oses to run exclusively on Apple Hardware only.

[naa42]

iTunes?

[gaiusparx]

Facebook will then sing it big together with Bing, which might work towards Bing's advantage. I can see in a future Bing and Facebook eating more and more into Google's advertising dollar. Which can only be good as in competition is good.

[tallanvor]

The funny thing is that Microsoft's adCenter isn't on the list of approved providers, which is a little surprising given that Microsoft and Facebook already seem to have a decent relationship.

[Duff]

Facebook doesn't want to be a Microsoft partner, they want to be AOL, circa 1994. (ie, a walled garden)

[gus_massa]

The problem is that tech-savvy user will consider that evil and will be annoyed. They need the goodwill of the community to be able to hire very good programmers.

[spyrosk]

When it comes to evilness Google has been posing as the good guy for a long time, while collecting a lot of personal information from their users in the background.

Facebook, on the other hand, is based on the users voluntarily and involuntarily (through friends etc) providing their information and isn't so discreet about it's attempts to leverage this data to profit.

This is known even by non savvy users (personally, I've met a lot of non technical people that were worried about Facebook's collection of data with regards to personal rights/privacy, but haven't once heard about Google's tactics) and has bitten them before, e.g. Beacon.

So I feel that Google won't be stigmatized by such a move, considering it's against an opponent perceived by the public as more evil.