'Search Neutrality' is neccessary to promote growth and innovation

Why do people write silly things? How would you enforce "search neutrality"? How do you define "relevance"?<p>Network neutrality is necessitated by the lack of competition in the telecommunications market. If Time Warner and AT&#38;T both enact policies I disagree with, I'm screwed. There are plenty of search engines, there is a relatively low barrier to entry for new search engines, and the switching cost is zero.<p>No, we shouldn't try to regulate the author's business plan into viability.

My comment from a dead link to a blog entry on this NYT article:<p>&#62;Because of its domination of the global search market and ability to penalize competitors while placing its own services at the top of its search results, Google has a virtually unassailable competitive advantage...The preferential placement of Google Maps helped it unseat MapQuest from its position as America’s leading online mapping service virtually overnight.<p>Alternately, it was a better product. Remember the first time you were able to drag a map? It wasn't in Mapquest. Let's see which is better today. I'm looking for New York City. I go to maps.google.com, and see a single search box. I type in NYC, and I see, within a second, the five boroughs I was looking for. Well done you, Google.<p>Next, I go to mapquest. They've got multiple search boxes, so I have to break up my search into address/city/state/zip code boxes? Ugh. Is it still 1998? Ok, I put in NYC into the "City" field, and the whole screen dims, with a box saying "processing". Even after the processing box goes away, the screen is still dimmed. How ugly. I scroll down to the map, and see that nothing's changing, even after waiting two minutes. I click, and the dim screen lightens, but I haven't gone anywhere. I go back to the search boxes, and again, search NYC. Oh, it's popping up a "which did you mean" alert next to the search box where I wasn't looking. 2 results: 1. Nyce Lake, AZ 2. Nyctea Hills, AK.<p>If this is their example of "unfair competitive advantage", I want more of it.

I don't think Google would disagree. Usually, when there's a "penalty" to a site's ranking, it's because the site is doing something that harms users, eg. malware, adspam. Google (and other search engines) has a vested interest in making sure that users find relevant, helpful results, because that's the only way they can keep them coming back.

The bigger issue is not negative impacts on ranking, but large search engines promoting content from their other properties inside the results. <i>cough</i> one box <i>cough</i>

The stated goal of search is to find relevant information. If Google somehow provides that information to me in a easy to digest way, who am i to refuse it? If not, i would go elsewhere for that information. Since net neutrality ensures that i can always go to an alternative source for information, i don't think search dominance is too much of a problem.

Did this line:<p>"Without search neutrality rules to constrain Google’s competitive advantage"<p>make anyone else immediately think, "Atlas Shrugged"?