Editor’s Note: To provide an historical perspective on some of the public policy issues which flow from the increasingly strong and diverse proposals to regulate Google, the following is an excerpt from the February 2010 SearchEngineLand article Do Search Engines (Google) “Harm Minority Owned Businesses”? by Greg Sterling.
I spoke to Bruce Levinson at some length about all this. Levinson is with the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, which publishes WatchdogWatch and wrote the post above. He recognizes the absence of facts behind the claims in the filing. His view is that there should be an investigation of whether the injuries (or hypothetical injuries and bias) described in the report actually exist. After speaking with him I would agree that some sort of study might be worthwhile.
I told him, however, that Google has no way of knowing which businesses are minority owned (large or small) and that its algorithm doesn’t and in fact can’t consider this factor. In the context of its local algorthim, Google’s increasing bias is in favor of local, small businesses and against larger, wealthier entities (e.g., aggregators, directories). But let’s assume for a moment that some sort of empirical study found that minority owned businesses were in fact disproportionately “less visible” in Google search results.
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