walkman - 11:59 pm on Sep 6, 2011 (gmt 0)

Get ready for more. Google has to hire more people and spend more money to fight and pay for stealing Android IP and the multiple anti-trust investigations for being an illegal monopoly. It's quite possible that Google is low on cash. How? IIRC, most of their remaining cash (after paying for Motorola) is outside USA due to their tax scams and they need to pay 35% or whatever the US tax is to bring it in USA.

Paying $500 million from shareholder's money so Larry wouldn't go to jail [online.wsj.com...] didn't help them either. AAPL and MSFT are also ganging up on Google, and so is everyone that wants a fair search engine. Finally Google has met its match, it's easy to bully site owners. Go and pick on Oracle, AAPL and MSFT with close to $150 Billion in their balance sheets. Loot Google, your time is running out...your offices were raided today by Korean authorities [ft.com...] and that's just appetizers.

Look what they said before they became Greedy Monster Inc:

[infolab.stanford.edu...]

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. ....In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines.