Discussions tend to fall into three brackets:
- Should search engines "clean up" results to remove infringing or unlawful content?
- How can accountants and business owners quantify and mitigate search engine dependency risks for businesses whose income is highly dependent on the secret ranking algorithms of search providers, algorithms subject to change without notice?
- Antitrust and whether search engines abuse their role as gatekeepers in order to promote their own goods and services above rivals, and what if anything can be done about this?
European Commission antitrust complaint
Foundem outlined their antitrust claim against Google. Foundem's complaint, alongside that of another price comparison website Ciao and a French legal search engine ejustice.fr has been under investigation by the European Commission since 2010 and the EC is due to report within months.
The audience heard how Google are alleged to have deliberately penalised price comparison websites so that results appear far lower down the search rankings than they would expect to for "organic" or "natural" search results.
Around the same time, Google launched their own price comparison service originally named Froogle - now simply Google Product Search, and are alleged to have placed their own service high in the rankings thereby diverting large volumes of lucrative traffic away from rival services towards their own.
There is compelling evidence suggesting Google did deliberately penalise price comparison sites in general, some of it presented on Foundem's campaign site searchneutrality.org, with the 30-minute video on the front page being particularly interesting.
However there are many legitimate reasons for Google to penalise price comparison sites for the general good of its users, not least of which the annoyance factor when searching for e.g. tips to fix a glitch on Samsung's latest Android phone, only to be bombarded by results from people selling the product when what I want is information about a product.
Natural search results fallacy
But the concept of natural or organic search results is a complete fabrication, responded Alec Muffett. Search listings are a result of an algorithm created by humans to make a search engine useful.
There's no natural phenomenon like gravity, explained Alec, at pains to point out he has no link to Google bar him using their search engine "because it gives me the relevant results I want, nine times out of ten."
"Relevance is a matter of taste. You don't have a right to be listed, it's Google's search engine and if you don't like it, use another."
Mark Margaretten continued in a similar vein, noting "penalise" is an emotive word which may infer a level of harshness, but Google penalises sites with no original content because it feels what these sites offer is not relevant to what its users want.
Shivaun had earlier likened search neutrality to network neutrality, but Mark disputed this analogy, noting that network neutrality was important because you simply can't access the internet without the pipe provided by an ISP.
And moreover, ISPs were often in a [localised] monopolistic position - they control the physical line providing internet to our house. This monopoly simply doesn't exist for search:
"Google is not a monopoly because 2 guys in a garage can beat Google just like Google beat Y!""Search neutrality is not a problem, it's Foundem's problem."
Digital Darwinism, brutal economics
Foundem's complaint is genuinely interesting from a regulatory perspective. On one hand, as Alec Muffett said, it doesn't matter if Google are promoting their own services in the same way it doesn't matter if e.g. Tesco puts its own brand wheat biscuits in front of rivals.
Note: Alec used Marks and Spencer in his example, but since M&S almost exclusively focuses on own brand I've taken the liberty of patching the analogy.
It doesn't matter because there's a limit to the value service providers can extract by way of doctoring results for their own ends before customers start to notice and desert the service, in the same way that shoppers expect to buy Weetabix and will shop elsewhere if they don't find them.
The moment search results stop being relevant is the day a search engine starts to die.
Additionally I have some sympathy with the "no right to be listed" argument. From a purist's perspective, search engines exist to help people find useful information; knowledge. They don't exist primarily to service the consumer market for goods and services.
If you've built a business reliant on people finding your website from a free listing on a search engine, it's not Google's problem.
Plus, even if evidence emerged that a basic level of search fairness was appropriate, enforcing this through regulation of search engines will almost certainly be counter-productive, in that by the time legislation arrives, search technology will have moved on, and legislation will lock operators into a solution for yesterday's problem.
Note: Foundem are not calling for regulation.
Moreover, when you have your own search offering, as in Foundem's engine, if it provides customer value, surely reliance on Google or any outside traffic driver should decrease over time - customers should choose it over Google when they want to compare products - because it gives them the relevant results and bottom-line value they want.
Often referred to as digital Darwinism, many believe the open unregulated internet offers a brutal but nevertheless honest test of business value. If your business doesn't offer value it will fail. If it is reliant on a dominant organism, it may succumb to this reliance, as I wrote about in Audience Monopoly.
Trust and antitrust
After writing Audience Monopoly in 2010, representatives from 2 major search engines and a couple of academics challenged me on why I thought open competition wouldn't win out, given the internet is relatively free and open with low barriers to entry?
There's no guarantee Facebook or Google will even exist in today's form in 5 year's time.
I have no view on the legitimacy of Foundem's specific claim, but I do have sympathy with one plank of Shivaun Raff's argument that was lost in the noise during some ill-tempered exchanges between panellists and audience members in last night's debate.
Antitrust in itself isn't about fairness, how a product works or even exploiting a market. It is about trust and the abuse of trust in the relationship between the searcher and search operator.
Speaking afterwards, Shivaun explained that search engine users know that adverts - paid-for results - are separate and clearly labelled. This forms an important part of the trust equation; users know that results appearing higher-up the main results listing are more likely to come from relevant sources than those lower down. Past experience leads users to trust search engines to offer relevant results.
Sponsored results appear because the sponsor has paid for them to appear, there is no implied endorsement of relevance.
If search engines choose to demote all price comparison websites that is their choice. But, if they then decide to selectively promote their own service - as Foundem alleges Google to have done, promotion under such circumstances is clearly analogous to an advert, and should be labelled as such.
Critical mass and audience share
However wrong it feels, I think it's fair to say Google is not a monopoly in the traditional sense. The simple fact is, as critics of my essay from 2010 point out, that there are no physical or regulatory barriers to entry for rivals.
But I think there are still legitimate concerns in this area. Whilst there are no physical barriers to entry, the very low revenue margins up for grabs for most web service providers (see Facebook IPO, 2 cents per active user per day) mean that a critical mass of users is required before a service becomes profitable.
Once critical mass is achieved, services seem to flip from loss making to extremely profitable (Facebook: $1bn profit from $3.7bn revenue).
Does the very low revenues per active user on offer effectively act as a barrier to entry? Is the market unwilling to support investment in rival search because of the huge cost in building an audience beyond critical mass?
Google had early mover advantage. It triumphed over early rivals Lycos, Excite and Alta Vista in an era when its competitors had very little to offer.
Now with net profit approaching $10bn a year, Google has the free cash to re-invest in maintaining its audience share. Reaching critical mass could indeed have the effect of creating an Audience Monopoly.
Many questions hinge on whether Google has an unassailable position.
Customer confusion and misplaced trust
Helping maintain audience share is a level of customer confusion in relation to search, the sometimes-misplaced trust in search results.
Many times friends and family tell me the "cheapest price is X" only for me to find an even cheaper price on page 10 of the search listings, although this effect is more down to investment in search engine optimisation (SEO) by retailers with a higher mark-up than abuse by search operators.
A surprisingly large percentage of people put a URL into a search box rather than browser address bar, and this is a simple but stark reminder of the power in Google's hands.
It also introduces an interesting thought experiment. If Google chose to redirect searches for microsoft.com to Google Apps, would that exploit users, or make them aware of their error and stop them misusing the service?
A serious rival to Google would help inform users. A serious rival would invest in marketing which draws attention to its own strengths over rivals' weaknesses. Strengths like the quality of results and the ease of finding products on sale at competitive prices.
And it's worth saying the price comparison industry in general has done itself no favours whatsoever.
The price comparison middlemen - a flawed business model?
Not referring to Foundem in any way, some promote their offering as a consumer-interest comparison service, yet have the business model of an advertiser, bringing a clear conflict of interest.
If the best value product is not willing to pay to advertise itself, it will never appear in a comparison, hence the lowest price on offer will not be the best price available.
Retailers and comparison sites - sometimes nothing more than middlemen inserting themselves in the value chain - have often relied on aggressive SEO to bring their offering to prominence and gain customers, irrespective of the true value offered.
It is therefore hard to look at a consumer issue such as antitrust without considering some of these wider issues.
The bigger picture helps explain some of the drivers behind search engine penalties. Unadulterated so-called natural search results introduce a different peril: the opportunity for middlemen to play the algorithm to cream traffic and profit at the consumer's expense.
Bringing relevance and value to users of search engines is mired in complexity as well as confusion, and sometimes the complexity is introduced to work around customer stupidity and prevent other websites abusing their users' trust.
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