Page & Brin: Poor Search Results
on Tuesday, September 28, 2021Larry Page & Sergey Brin Money Quote saying money biases search results in 2006 article on their Standford University research for Google. Larry Page & Sergey Brin said:
“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers” — Larry Page & Sergey Brin
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“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results” — Larry Page & Sergey Brin
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In these quotes, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, seem to be acknowledging potential downsides of advertising-based business models for search engines. Specifically:
- They note that relying on advertising income can create “an incentive to provide poor quality search results” by prioritizing more commercially oriented content over objectively relevant information.
- Page and Brin also state they expect search engines funded primarily through advertising will inherently develop “bias towards the advertisers” through favoring paid placement and sponsored results, rather than optimizing for users’ actual information needs.
The implication is that depending heavily on advertising revenue introduces conflicts of interest that could compromise search neutrality and quality over time if left unaddressed. Page and Brin appear to be preemptively justifying Google’s original preference for organic, non-intrusive ads and focus on delivering high-quality results to users over maximizing short-term ad dollars according to their perspective on balancing business and user interests for search platforms.
Overall, the quotes seem aimed at acknowledging potential downsides of overly commercializing search engines and establishing Google’s goal of prioritizing user experience through unbiased results rather than short-term profits, which was a riskier strategy but helped establish trust in the early days of the company and online search market.