Making billions of dollars by controlling the content people see is not a trivial matter, it needs to be closely monitored so that visitors can distinguish between ads (paid results, places etc) and natural rankings. Is it time?
tangor
5:48 am on Nov 8, 2010 (gmt 0)
Who watches the watchers?
Catch-22.
But this will become (in time) something for goobermint (sic) to justify their existence.
While they manage redistribution of wealth of those "billions", etc....
Sgt_Kickaxe
6:22 am on Nov 8, 2010 (gmt 0)
Good point tangor, who watches the watchers indeed.
As the line blurs between providing the most relevant results to searchers and providing more revenue for stockholders it's getting awefully hard to tell where the sponsored ads stop and natural search results start on many serps... if the natural results even start on page one at all. Something's gotta give because it pays infinitely more to rank sites than to build them these days.
Possible solution: a browser that can accept keywords in the navigation bar as well as urls. When a keyword is entered the browser could return the top results from a RANDOM search engine by default, unless and not until after an engine is ACTIVELY picked from a list to be the default engine. This would require very little modification to most current browsers.
If browsers become more neutral by default the search landscape would change and people would more naturally end up with the product THEY want. Search companies would have to worry about alienating their userbase when they add even more monetization to natural results. I see this as a solution because it would teach users that they have a choice, and how to exercise it.
Additional benefit: You wouldn't need to visit a search engine site to enter a keyword, it could be done from your browser, and that browser could have a "don't like these results? try this engine instead" with the other engine options.
Another option: entering keywords into your navigation bar would pull up your internet service providers choice of search engine by default and the major search engines would then have to negotiate agreements directly with internet service providers to be that default search engine. This would pull some of the billions in profits the major search engines enjoy and redirect it to the companies who foot the bandwidth and infrastructure bills.
I think I like that option the best since it takes care of other issues currently facing internet service providers. Search engines currently receive an incredibly disproportionate profit margin when compared to most internet service providers.
Status_203
9:51 am on Nov 8, 2010 (gmt 0)
The ISPs are already paid for the service that they provide. If they're losing money then they have packaged/priced their service wrongly. Why should they be rewarded for that? Besides, they'll just go with whichever service can pay more, which just means more monetization, not less.
I'd like the other idea a lot.. if there were any good serps from trustable companies (which lets out Google, and definately lets out MS - I'm not a fan of the ways in which Google are cashing in these days but at least they've built their position on success rather than dodgy contracts and monopoly abuse).
What worries me most about the future of search is the high barrier to entry caused by the number of patents held by the big players.
