There are excellent public interest grounds to have a search engine whose rankings are transparent.
Google's competitors argue that Google designs its search display to promote Google 'products' like Google Maps, Google Places, and Google Shopping, ahead of competitors like MapQuest, Yelp, and product-search sites.
Google's ability to pick winners and losers in the information world is a menace. These companies have the ability to determine which media companies are successful and which ones are failures. If I adopt a business plan that doesn't line up with Google's, then they're not going to reward me.
Advertising always corrupts the goal of the search engine, which is to try to give you the most important stuff, not the stuff someone paid there to be there.
Search engines take misinformation and put it into our echo chamber. Trying to counter it is the functional equivalent of having your hair full of honey and bees and your trying to whack the bees with your hands.
Teachers say to me, 'The internet is full of rubbish, wrong answers.' But you would be surprised how just long it takes to find wrong information on Google, and where it's not obvious that it's wrong.
Net neutrality would require that every search engine produce an equal number of results that satisfy every disagreement about the issue... Just think of it as Fairness Doctrine for the Internet. I'm not making this up.
Google gives preference to its own products, so having a Google+ account influences your search rankings.
So the first things that you see when you look up something on Google could be dependent on the amount of advertising or something else. Since it is a profit making institution, it is going to reflect the interests and concerns of those who fund it, which is advertisers.
One thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines. You show me your search history, and I'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes. We are more honest with search engines than we are with our families.
Anyone unhappy with Google can use other search engines - including DuckDuckGo and Blekko, along with Bing or Yahoo.
The search button on the browser no longer provides an objective search, but a commercial one.
