> Google would certainly love to present fare recommendations when searchers look for airline tickets, rather than simply directing them to another site. Companies like Expedia worry that the acquisition could lead Google to present a matrix of actual fares on its search results page, above all of the other sites that sell tickets. At that point, the key question becomes: which sites will Google’s results link to, and what (if anything) will be the cost of those links?
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> To make its case that the Google/ITA deal is anticompetitive, FairSearch dredges up some old remarks made by Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in a paper from their Stanford days.
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> “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers,” the two men wrote while in graduate school. Other, similar quotes are included, all with clear implication that it is Google which now has the incentive to game its search results in subtle ways that will benefit the company.
via [arstechnica.com](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/expedia-travelocity-say-google-has-crossed-the-creepy-line.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss)
Google is slowly becoming the antithesis of its original Mission Statement. With no effective competition, the profit motive has trumped the consumer’s desire for useful information.
The innovation and inspiration laid out thoughtfully in those old Stanford papers is long gone.
And it’s beginning to show, even in simple search results. Remember when the first few results were almost always exactly what you were looking for? That’s why everyone switched to Google in the first place. That “I’m feeling Lucky” button, demonstrated an incredible confidence in the quality of the product; Google knew what you wanted, and was going to take you right there as quickly as possible.
I don’t know about you, but I’m finding myself on page two and three of Google search results, hunting around for what I wanted, much more often than I was a few years ago. Forget about feeling lucky; now I’m just feeling hopeful.
I understand that public companies need to grow, expand, make geometrically increasing amounts of money, etc. But there’s never an excuse for not putting the customer’s needs first. Selling the top slots in a search result to the highest bidder, even when those links are unlikely to be in the users’ best interests, is what Google’s competitors were doing when Google swooped in and killed them all.
So who is going to swoop in and kill Google?
