Search engine bias is particularly insidious — Trisent

“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 theadvertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. ….., search engine bias is particularly insidious.”

Larry Page and Sergey Brin — 1998

These are direct quotations taken from a 1998 paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page [1], the founders of Google, when their company was in its infancy. The quotes can all be found in “Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives” of the paper. I agree 100% with the quoted statements but wonder if Brin and Page are still aligned to these, and has Google abandoned their original ideals to become what some may consider to be a “particularly insidious” behemoth?

I hope to be able to post some details soon of one project I am investing a lot of time in that will remove advertising from the search business model and deliver quality user-focussed search with no commercial bias. So watch this space!

[1] The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, Stanford University, 1998, http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/1/1998-8.pdf

Originally published at https://www.trisent.com on July 25, 2019.