Great article; it’s nice to see someone in the industry giving Google credit for their (well-deserved) success. I think a lot of what has made Google so dominant is that they listen to the marketplace and make improvements on the products of others. Innovation on someone else’s ideas is an important part of business, and one that we as consumers benefit from. Why do so many companies become “bad” simply because they’re doing well?

I suggest those who disagree with Frank give “Atlas Shrugged” a read and think hard about the negative effects of over-regulation. Frank writes, “Why should anyone in the free market be obligated to being relegated to a ‘public service’ status just because they do something better than most?” Ayn Rand would agree.

Based upon limited browsing

1. He was being screwed by Adwords quality score penalties and had to be manually whitelisted

2. Search – whilst in 3 years of penalties I would have probably taken the hint and invested some time in creating content Google wants to see for search, rather than concentrating on what users want… the cheapest prices every time, I still believe in some ways the penalties are not being evenly applied as the sites ranking above Foundem are in many cases worse.

Certainly 15 years ago the WHich? magazine would be a credible source for a review, thus if they can get 3rd place in a flight comparrison search that is fairly useful for a visitor.
http://www.searchneutrality.org/foundem-google-story

The “penalty” for search exists, it is fixable and should if applied fairly have taken out many listings above them first. Some of their competitors should probably have had their Adsense banned by now as well due to image placement.
.-= Andy Beard´s last blog ..MyBlogLog R.I.P Long Live Blogcatalog =-.

BTW – I don’t know why everyone calls this a monopoly. There is plenty of competition. If Google stopped being superior for 3 weeks their market share would vanish.

I don’t know how to implement search neutrality and agree that it is a huge task. Probably impossible. What I would suggest is a dedicated algo only option for Google. That way, it is as close to search neutrality as you can get. Google could still gain advantage on the organic side since they know how they rank pages. A pretty big advantage but not SERP tampering. They can also use Adwords free of charge or other placement for their own products.

Keep organic search organic.
.-= Mikeok´s last blog ..Hey Mister, can I rent your Zombie Network? =-.

That said, I agree with your comments that the concept of “Search Neutrality” as described in the NYT piece is unrealistic and has major challenges and questions to be answered. But I’m glad NYT at least started the conversation. This is an important conversation that needs to happen. And frankly, this same conversation has been going on for years amongst advertisers behind closed doors or over cocktails at search conferences. I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m glad the subject is now out in the open.