08 Sep Sauce for the goose, not sauce for the Google

Until its cave-in to Verizon last month, Google was the most prominent corporate advocate of net neutrality—but only for others, not for itself. Recently, Google has applied self-serving filters to its search results in a manner reminiscent of, say, China.

Late in July, Google searches began filtering out any results for the website bestofyoutube.com, an aggregator of videos from the Google-owned video site.

I can understand why Google might have a problem with bestofyoutube, which, it could be argued, infringes Google’s intellectual property by poaching YouTube content. Mind you, it would be a brazen case for Google to make, given that YouTube itself contains petabytes of pirated content. Be that as it may, the proper remedy is to seek relief from the perceived offense through negotiations or in court.

The least-Googley solution is to skew the world’s knowledge database by misleading google searchers into thinking the offending website no longer exists.

In the past, Google has filtered search results for websites that try to game its search algorithm. That’s a different matter,  possibly justifiable as necessary to protect the integrity of the search process. Pretending a company Google doesn’t like doesn’t exist undermines the integrity of the search algorithm.

Earlier complaints about Google gaming its own search results in a self-serving manner here and here.

Contrarian has asked Google’s media department for a comment but, you know, they’re quite big and we’re quite small. Don’t hold your breath.

Hat tip: SBD