RhinoFish - 8:21 pm on Aug 28, 2012 (gmt 0)

Discriminatory pricing simply means preferential pricing or other accommodations for some customers giving them an upper hand in commerce resulting in less competition. Auction based PPC by default works this way (hence the cover of "quality scoring").

I think is why forums are dying off. :-)

You didn't answer the question, just levied more confusing, unfocused accusatory conspiracy theories. Boards are full of them, reasonable people find these discussions to be huge time bandits. But, I'm pig headed, so let's keep chatting about it.

Look, name these parties that G, according to your theory, is giving favorable treatment to. Or levy a believable reason why G would do this. Or heck, make up something funny.

In an auction, the more people bidding / competing, does tend to drive up prices - Google wants exactly the opposite of what you claim - more bidders is better for them, fewer is worse. Giving any party the "upper hand" is bad for Google.

Here's the truth - G serves the visitors, that's their "secret" conspiracy. Bidding advertisers will be plentiful where ever there's traffic - serve the searcher, advertisers will line up in droves. Make the searches super relevant, people will keep clicking - and making G billions. Sell out to a few parties, search quality (in the searcher's eyes) will go down, and competing engines will take share from G. G holds no love for any advertiser, they love the visitor - they're conniving like that, they know who ever wins over the consumer, will have the advertiser's attention.

To imagine that G is conspiring with a few companies to give them an edge, to reduce relevance, to allow their own searches (and market share lead) to suffer, so they can get kickbacks from a few (when they can convince the many to bid up every auction - and there are lots of auctions every second) is lunacy.

No offense to you all, you're interesting, but imo, badly misguided.

There, plenty of ammo for conspiracy theories to be levied at me. Time to take it up a notch everyone! My uncle Sergey says you won't dare, but his pal Larry bet him $200M "fun" bet that you will...