(Just as a reminder: while I am a Google employee, the following post is my personal opinion.)
Recently I read a fascinating essay that I wanted to comment on. I found it via Ars Technica and it discusses “search neutrality” (PDF link, but I promise it’s worth it). It’s written by James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School. The New York Times called Grimmelmann “one of the most vocal critics” of the proposed Google Books agreement, so I was curious to read what he had to say about search neutrality.
What I discovered was a clear, cogent essay that calmly dissects the idea of “search neutrality” that was proposed in a New York Times editorial. If you’re at all interested in search policies, how search engines should work, or what “search neutrality” means when people ask search engines for information, advice, and answers–I highly recommend it. Grimmelmann considers eight potential meanings for search neutrality throughout the article. As Grimmelmann says midway through the essay, “Search engines compete to give users relevant results; they exist at all only because they do. Telling a search engine to be more relevant is like telling a boxer to punch harder.” (emphasis mine)
On the notion of building a completely transparent search engine, Grimmelmann says
A fully public algorithm is one that the search engine’s competitors can copy wholesale. Worse, it is one that websites can use to create highly optimized search-engine spam. Writing in 2000, long before the full extent of search-engine spam was as clear as it is today, Introna and Nissenbaum thought that the “impact of these unethical practices would be severely dampened if both seekers and those wishing to be found were aware of the particular biases inherent in any given search engine.” That underestimates the scale of the problem. Imagine instead your inbox without a spam filter. You would doubtless be “aware of the particular biases” of the people trying to sell you fancy watches and penis pills–but that will do you little good if your inbox contains a thousand pieces of spam for every email you want to read. That is what will happen to search results if search algorithms are fully public; the spammers will win.
And Grimmelmann independently hits on the reason that Google is willing to take manual action on webspam:
Search-engine-optimization is an endless game of loopholing. …. Prohibiting local manipulation altogether would keep the search engine from closing loopholes quickly and punishing the loopholers–giving them a substantial leg up in the SEO wars. Search results pages would fill up with spam, and users would be the real losers.
I don’t believe all search engine optimization (SEO) is spam. Plenty of SEOs do a great job making their clients’ websites more accessible, relevant, useful, and fast. Of course, there are some bad apples in the SEO industry too.
Grimmelmann concludes
The web is a place where site owners compete fiercely, sometimes viciously, for viewers and users turn to intermediaries to defend them from the sometimes-abusive tactics of information providers. Taking the search engine out of the equation leaves users vulnerable to precisely the sorts of manipulation search neutrality aims to protect them from.
It’s that time again! Next week I’ll record some new webmaster videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post questions or suggestions and vote topics up and down. I won’t be able to answer every single question, but I’ll tackle several popular ones plus a few of the more interesting questions. Please submit questions that lots of people would be interested in, not just a question about your specific site.
Just a reminder: please leave your question on the Google Moderator page, not in the comments here. When you leave a question on the moderator page, people can vote for the questions and I can see which questions people are most interested in.
Have you given Buzz a try recently? Robert Scoble just asked if it was time to reconsider Buzz. Coincidentally I said almost the same thing in a question and answer session with Danny Sullivan last week at the SMX Advanced search conference.
I’ll repeat what I said last week. Do you remember when you first started on Twitter, and you didn’t know quite what to do with it? Who do I follow? What do I say? I didn’t really “get” Twitter for months. But as I found interesting people to follow and got the hang of it, I began to see the appeal of Twitter and started using it more often. I’ve noticed Buzz is tracing that same trajectory for me: an initial burst, followed by a bit of a slump, and then a steady climb as I found people that make Buzz interesting.
Buzz fits nicely between tweeting and blogging. Twitter is perfect when you want to share a link or a single crystalized idea. But Twitter isn’t as strong for group discussion or expressing medium- to long-form ideas. At the same time, blogging is great when you want a permalinked url that will stand the test of time, but it can be a real pain to write a blog post. I always feel like I have to polish my blog posts and it seems to take me at least an hour to write a blog post no matter what I say.
Buzz has the casual feel of Twitter, but you can dive into a topic pretty deeply. Buzz is easier than a blog post, but can look almost as polished. I find Buzz especially good for asking opinions, because the signal-to-noise ratio is (at least right now) quite high. I think Buzz is incredibly strong for internal company discussions too, so I’m looking forward to Buzz rolling into Google Apps.
I’m incredibly happy that Google has added the option to search over SSL by going to https://www.google.com/ — note the “s” in “https.” I’m writing this blog post in a hotel right now because I’m in Europe for a week doing a series of tech talks, but I could just as easily be working down at local Dublin cafe with an open WiFi hotspot. In both cases, I might want to do a private search that the hotel or local cafe can’t see. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection provides an encrypted tunnel between my browser and Google, so other people can’t sniff what I’m searching for.
I believe encrypted search is an important option for Google searchers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked for secure search in the past (see this post from 2009), and I credit them for helping to put this on Google’s radar. Another inspiration that helped to spark this project was Cory Doctorow’s book “Little Brother.” It was one of my favorite books of 2008 and while I won’t go into the book’s plot here, it’s a quick, fun read. “Little Brother” also makes a compelling case for encrypting HTTP traffic on the web.
Some people don’t yet fully understand how SSL search works. I saw one commenter say “If they still pass in the search parameters in the URL (Get), what’s the point? People can still see what you queried, if they made them “post” messages it might actually do something.” It’s important to realize that even though you as a surfer can see the query in the url, the sites between your browser and Google can’t. Google OS demonstrated that by sniffing a regular HTTP query and an HTTPS query in Wireshark to show that the query can’t be seen going over the wire.
Thanks to all the people at Google who did the all the hard work and heavy lifting to deliver this. One of the main engineers behind the effort was Evan Roseman, a member of the webspam team who you might have met at previous search conferences. In fact, Evan was originally scheduled to be on our site review session at Google I/O this past Thursday, but we decided that launching SSL search took priority. I also wanted to say thanks and congratulations to the other Googlers (for example Andrew Widdowson and Murali Viswanathan, but also many, many others) who generously gave their time and effort to make the launch happen and happen smoothly. You might think that switching on SSL for websearch is easy, but for a website with the complexity and scale of Google, it’s really not. The launch wouldn’t have happened without a ton of assistance from Googlers from many parts of the company, and I sincerely appreciate it.
By the way, if you’re attending Google I/O you’ll probably want to install the very spiff Android app for it. You can search for [Google I/O] in the Android Market. And if you want to know what to expect in the SEO site review session, here’s the video from the panel we did last year:
If you see me at Google I/O, please say hello and tell me what you wish Google would do that we’re not doing.
I also wanted to say thanks and congratulations to the other Googlers (for example Andrew Widdowson and Murali Viswanathan, but also many, many others) who generously gave their time and effort to make the launch happen and happen smoothly. You might think that switching on SSL for websearch is easy, but for a website with the complexity and scale of Google, it’s really not. The launch wouldn’t have happened without a ton of assistance from Googlers from many parts of the company, and I sincerely appreciate it.
