[Still Thinking]

Now I'm the farthest thing you'll ever find from a Google fan, but this is ridiculous. I guess if you're desperate to find something worse than a terrible company, your best bet is to look at the government. How DARE they not serve metasearches like Dogpile. Why would we need a search engine that actually...searches?? Obviously they should just all ask each other instead!

[muawiyah]

The business model that makes Google.com work is to sell positioning ~ like advertising in a newspaper. Some spots get more coverage but they pay more.

Also you can think of it as a GIGANTIC Yellow Pages!

I have no problem with their placement algorithms ~ and have used them to my advantage from time to time.

Let a thousand flowers bloom paid for by other people!

[Deaf Smith]

"I did a search at Google today for “cars”"

You were searching for the band and instead were directed to automobiles?

[Deaf Smith]

Cars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTr-ho8E6uc

[CharlesWayneCT]

I think the author missed the point, but can’t tell if they missed it on purpose, by accident, or actually don’t believe the point has any merit.

It’s not that Google provides results for a search. It’s that google provides results for shopping items that take you to places to buy things for which google gets paid.

The user might think google knows you want the cheapest prices, or places close to your home, or places with cheap shipping; but google’s ranking of results puts stores/websites which make google money higher than other web sites that might sell the product more cheaply.

Now, I’m not saying the point is worth being investigated over, or that google doesn’t have the absolute right to freely provide ANY type of results they want to provide — after all, we freely choose to use google, and if we don’t like the results we can choose another search engine. Google at least will allow you to search for other search engines.

But the point being made isn’t as assinine as the article suggests.

[McBuff]

Mods, On the post excerpt page, I occasionally get a distortion of text. It looks like it occurs where quotation marks and apostrophes are used. It only occurs on the excerpt page and only with an occasional post. Is this me or is this a bug somewhere? (see excerpt below as it appeared on the except page (not the full post page though)

I did a search at Google today for “cars” and was shocked. Rather than list links allowing me to search for “cars” on Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Voila, Naver and Yandex, Google instead favored its own search results. I’m glad the EU will be investigating whether this favoritism violates anti-trust laws. Consider the evidence. Here’s a search on Google for cars:As you can clearly see, none of the competing search engines I’ve named are listed in the top results. Rather than show them, Google instead shows pages about cars that it has collected across the web using its own technology.Google’s behavior...