“Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. Th e goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.  …., w e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers 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

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