Advertising and Mixed Motives

From the Birth of Google

[iamlost]

To refresh my memory I have been re-reading papers on SE theory and practice. Had forgotten the following from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [www-db.stanford.edu] - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
Note: bold red emphasis is mine.

8 Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives

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.

...we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

...Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious...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. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. 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.

:-)

[digitalghost]

Ahh, the idealism of youth, especially college youth. Long before they considered that funds would be necessary to sustain such a large endeavor.

Funny how advertising, <cough>text link advertising<cough> has come back to bite them.