FC: A blessedly dumb idea: Google should be a regulated "utility!"

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[A website becomes popular, thus it must be "regulated?" By the Federal 
Department of Software Quality, perhaps? Words fail me. --Declan]

---

Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 12:25:29 -0700
From: "Jeffrey St. Clair" <sitka () attbi com>
To: CP List <counterpunch-list () counterpunch org>,
   Dave Marsh <marsh6 () optonline net>, Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
Subject: Brandt: Google's Original Sin


PageRank: Google's Original Sin

by Daniel Brandt
August 2002
http://www.google-watch.org/pagerank.html

[...]

PageRank must be streamlined so that the "tyranny of the
rich" characteristics are scaled down in favor of a more
egalitarian approach to link popularity. This would greatly
simplify the complex and recursive calculations that are now
required to rank two billion web pages, which must be very
expensive for Google. The crawl must not be PageRank driven.
There should be a way for Google to arrange the crawl so
that if a site cannot be fully covered in one cycle,
Google's crawlers can pick up where they left off on the
next cycle.

Google is so important to the web these days, that it
probably ought to be a public utility. Regulatory interest
from agencies such as the FTC is entirely appropriate, but
we feel that the FTC addressed only the most blatant abuses
among search engines. Google, which only recently began
using sponsored links and ad boxes, was not even an object
of concern to the Ralph Nader group, Commercial Alert, that
complained to the FTC.

This was a mistake, because Commercial Alert failed to look
closely enough at PageRank. Some aspects of PageRank, as
presently implemented by Google, are nearly as pernicious as
pay for placement. There is no question that the FTC should
regulate advertising agencies that parade as search engines,
in the interests of protecting consumers. Google is still a
search engine, but not by much. They can remain a search
engine only by fixing PageRank's worst features.

_________________

Daniel Brandt is founder and president of Public Information
Research, Inc., a tax-exempt public charity that sponsors
NameBase. He began compiling NameBase in 1982, from material
that he started collecting in 1974, and is now the
programmer and webmaster for PIR's several sites. He
participates in various forums where webmasters share
observations about the often-secretive algorithms, bugs, and
behavior of various search engines. Brandt has been watching
Google's interaction with NameBase ever since Google, in
October, 2000, became the first search engine to go "deep"
on PIR's main site by crawling thousands of dynamic pages.




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