The Story
The BBC is dropping £100 million of marketing funds on Google to raise its search ranking. The money is going towards certain keywords, such as the Mercury Music Prize, so that when users search something involving the keywords, Google’s algorithm will be more likely to make the BBC the top result instead of some BBC competitor. For those who don’t know, search ranking is part of how Google returns search results. If site X were ranked higher than site Y and both had articles of the same degree of relevance, Google would place site X’s content above site Y’s.
It All Seems Wrong
Someone else talking about this story said that this doesn’t bother him at all – why shouldn’t Google take money in exchange for ranking? His comparison was that CNN promoted Twitter in the early days, and Twitter promotes CNN’s Twitter presence. But the difference here is that Google does not just represent the 25 million people on Twitter, but really the entire internet that anyone cares about (if it’s not on Google, you probably haven’t seen it).
The first problem I see is that I want my search engine to return results in the form of relevance, not perceived relevance. What’s the difference? Well, if the BBC spends £100 million saying that they’re the best result for Techgeist, everyone who works on TG loses out pretty significantly. That’s not cool. And from a user perspective, if I search the Mercury Music Prize, I should get the Wikipedia article or the event website, not the BBC.
The other concerned raised by this BBC-Google transaction is where this puts Google in regards to net neutrality. It’s not like Google is delisting content at someone else’s request, but this does change what has always been a hands-off approach to indexing the web. But if Google is now accepting payments as a replacement for its algorithm, then can we say the search company is truly neutral? I say no.
UPDATE
According to the BBC, the source info about their £100 million campaign is bupkis. The BBC is spending half of that, and not to improve search ranking at all, but just on normal Adwords (not sure why they’re doing since who clicks on those, but whatever). So no foul play is going on. Doesn’t change the point of the article that Google should remain neutral. Anyway, sorry for the confusion.
