Signal to Noise

The San Francisco Chronicle is running a piece of tripe that attempts to leverage Google’s long-held stance on network neutrality as a headfake to distract people from the unsavory nature of their fast-in-coming acquisition of Yahoo’s search business, a move which some feel is a bad thing. An anti-competitive thing, in fact.  Possibly, an illegal thing.

Yeah, like Microsoft bundling software with Windows. Remember that?

Well, as it turns out, Google has been pwning Yahoo at search for 6 – 7 years, and the white hairs in Washington are only now noticing the impact.  Of course, who’s complaining?  Google’s domination of the search space has:

- Put an extremely downward pressure on advertising costs (oddly enough, the opposite tends to occur when too few competitors are involved)

- Reduced barriers to entry for keyword driven advertisers

- Made it possible for smalltime publishers, many of whom never made a penny on the web, to, you guessed it, make money on the web

- Legitimized pay-per-click over pay-per-impression

The truth is, Google just does search better, and has for a long time. I guess the truth hurts when the previous king becomes the marginalized underdog, a la Yahoo. So, to all those pundits poo-pooing Google because of their absolute crushing of Yahoo (and Microsoft) in the search war, I would propose this one question: Which search engine do YOU use?

Starts with a G, don’t it.  Yup, thought so.