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Anarchy in search engine land: Google minus Google

Written on 14th August 2008 3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Our Finnish Webtipr is a search engine anarchist. He denies submission to Google. Sure, he uses it a lot, and probably couldn’t live without it, but he’s critical. Timo Paloheimo basically has three problems with the search giant. He was so kind to mail them to me:

Google has 70% market share in the US, worldwide even more. (in Finland their market share is said to be 95%).

Google has no transparency, they do not reveal how their search engine ranks content. There are numerous opinions that Google does indeed favor their own content.

Google’s reason for existence is to make money, which is done by delivering the best possible results for them, not the best for the user. A monopoly can do that.

You’ve probably heard these complaints before, maybe you discuss them with friends once in a while. But for Timo, it didn’t end with just complaining. He has used Google Custom Search to create a version of Google that doesn’t search within Google-owned services. So no Knol, YouTube, or Blogger. Google Minus Google offers you trustworthy results.

Media company or search engine?

Paloheimo found inspiration for his project in a New York Times article titled “Is Google a Media Company?“. The article raised questions like whether Google would give Knol pages a higher ranking than, say, a Mahalo or About.com page.

Paloheimo doubts whether Google offers the best pages, as it’s the party that offers the results, but also makes money from them. As an example, he mailed me two screenshots of a search for “analytics”. The Google search shows links to the Google Analytics tool and the blog, Google Minus Google offers links to Wikipedia pages and companies who specialize in analytics.

The best results

“Don’t get me wrong”, says Paloheimo – who hopes Google consider his idea to be a parody -, “I’ve been a Google fan for years and I use it every day perhaps a few hundred times. I love the search engine, it has delivered the best results. I want it to stay that way.”

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About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

3 comments/trackbacks to “Anarchy in search engine land: Google minus Google”

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[...] of formerly trustworthy tools like search machines and comparisons sites becomes doubtful. I earlier reported about Google ranking its own content higher in the search results (i.e. Knol above Yahoo! Answers), [...]

By Bob Boynton on Aug 15, 2008

I am doing some ’serious’ searching with google for the next several weeks. So I thought I should see how google and google-minus-google are different in my world [US video politics].

If the two are the same except google includes references to google that are left out by google-minus-google then google should find more but when you drop out the google finds that are connected to google what is found by the searches should be the same.

That was almost true.

I searched for an Obama video just placed on YouTube. I used the url in order to reduce the interpretation of whether it was or was not about the video.

Google produced 16 results. Google-without-google produced 14 results.

Google got four ‘finds’ that are directly related to google [as a media company): http://www.youtube.com, video.google.com, video.google.nl, and video.google.de. I think finding the video on YouTube was a plus. Next-webers might be interested that video.google.nl was on the list. Are you and your friends following the US campaign on YouTube?

Google-without-google overlapped with the original google search except for: it produced 2 'copies' of the same post in one case, and it found a post that google did not find.

So what? Well, commentary about the video seems to be light; these are not exactly big numbers. Since I was looking for a video on YouTube I think finding it there was good. Of course, not everybody is looking for videos on YouTube.

I cannot tell how these results compare with the search for analytics since I cannot read the results of the search [the images are much too small for reading]. But what I found is about what one would expect. Google is adding some references to itself; and they were at the top of the search results. After that they are pretty much the same results.

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By Robin on Aug 16, 2008

And as a by-product Google pay him for all the Ads displayed next to the results! ;)

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