Search Neutrality

Well, it’s the end of what has been a very long day on the receiving end of a mud-slinging barrage from what is perhaps the world’s mightiest PR machine.

There are a number of important inaccuracies in the story Google has been weaving, which we will address in due course. But, in the meantime anyone interested in the facts behind Foundem’s European Anti-Trust complaint might want to read the following:

Foundem’s FCC Comments (Describing how Google’s Universal Search mechanism poses an immediate threat to healthy competition and innovation)

Foundem’s Search Neutrality Op-Ed (Search But You May Not Find, New York Times)

Foundem’s Google Penalty Story

One important point that probably shouldn’t wait is to correct the impression that Google has tried to create that Foundem’s European filing is concerned solely with Google’s Penalty algorithms. Either Google hasn’t read the entire complaint (it is quite long!), or it is being deliberately misleading. The complaint gives roughly equal billing to Google’s increasing use of arbitrary penalties (both in Search and in AdWords) and its increasingly aggressive deployment of Universal Search (Google’s mechanism for “blending”/bundling its own services into prominent positions within its web search results). Foundem’s position is that, coupled with Google’s overwhelming dominance in Search, these tools give Google an unparalleled and virtually unassailable competitive advantage. And this advantage reaches far beyond the confines of search. Universal Search allows Google to leverage its search engine monopoly into virtually any field it chooses: price comparison, books, online mapping, financial search, property search, job search, travel search, and so on.