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It can't possibly be illegal for search to be biased. Search is synonym for bias. Ranking is the definition of bias! It's like when people claim "discrimination" is illegal, when the definition of discriminating is to recognize a difference or to tell apart. Discrimination is not illegal, discrimination based on a protected class is illegal. Likewise for anti-trust, what's illegal is if they are abusing their dominant market position in search to suppress competition. Can promoting your own product, in and of itself, be anti-competitive? It seems like stretch. Just like Microsoft installing a browser (an absolutely necessary component of any modern OS) in and of itself is not anti-competitive. I think a company has to go much, much further to warrant this level of scrutiny. Is Google actively blocking me from accessing superior content? And if they did, what's stopping people from abandoning Google? In the Windows OS case, there literally was no realistic alternative at the time. So people had a gun to their head, and there were APIs which only the IE team could access keeping the competition at bay. Google Search is a very different beast. I think Google does a fairly good job of keeping the "Chinese Wall" between Search and the other groups. I think the key question is whether they somehow have to open up their meta-search capabilities to third parties. For example, the way the calculator, or word definition lookup, or weather, or airfare search, or even Google+, is now integrated into search, this is a coupling which no 3rd party could ever compete with... I don't know a solution. For now I think we don't need a "solution". I want these features, I use them constantly and appreciate them. If DDG or Bing offered better meta-search / charms I would switch and use them. They are literally a keystroke away, there is nothing stopping anyone from using a competitor. Which I why I tend to think the whole thing is a political farce and a tax on Google's success. |