| > Which really, I feel, demonstrates the perverse incentives of free search. These pages display ads, so upranking them means more revenue for google, and you do the opposite. Google's creators had correctly identified this problem and their knowledge of it is why early google was good. https://alexandre.storelli.fr/advertising-and-mixed-motives-... > Advertising and Mixed Motives (Sergey Brin & Larry Page, 1998) > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media, we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. > But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm. Once they earned their place as a monopoly the same understanding was applied to wield it on the darker side. > “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They know exactly what it is that they are doing. |