Early this year, the Federal Trade Commission made the surprise decision not to bring an antitrust case against Google for its globally dominant search engine. Last week, Google announced the biggest change in how search works in more than a decade. The two events are not unconnected.
Googling increasingly produces answers, not just results. The first generation of search relied on keywords, based on links to Web pages that best matched the words in the search. Google's search gurus have found ways to deliver more relevant links and increasingly even to give answers in search results without users having to click on any links.
Google Inc. signage is displayed in front of the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, U.S., on Friday, Sept. 27, 2013.
Internally, Google calls the new search algorithm "Hummingbird," for what the company says is greater precision and speed. Danny Sullivan of the trade publication Search Engine Land wrote, "When Google switched to Hummingbird, it's as if it dropped the old engine out of a car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch."
The new search uses a semantic approach that seeks to understand the meaning of the search. "The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words," Mr. Sullivan wrote. For example, a search for "acid reflux prescription" used to deliver links to Web pages listing different drugs. The new search results go deeper, focusing on information about treatments, including the risks of medication.
Results differ if a search uses concepts such as how, why, when or where. That's especially helpful for searches done by voice on mobile phones, which usually are worded in full sentences. A search for "How do I tie a bow tie?" links to videos on this feat, whereas a search for "bow tie" points to Brooks Brothers and others who sell them.
A comparison search such as "Android or iPhone?" shows links to commentaries featuring relative pros and cons. "Tell me about semantic search" shows results that are more explanatory than for just "semantic search."
No regulators had to review or bless Google's relaunch of its search engine, which handles two-thirds of all searches. This innovation would not have been possible if Google were in the middle of a massive antitrust case—as it almost was.
The FTC spent two years investigating Google as a monopolist. Competitors like Microsoft lobbied for a prosecution, as did companies that rely on Google search results for their business, which feared the power of a dominant search engine.
Politico estimated that Google spent $25 million on lobbyists and lawyers to get its way in Washington. In announcing that no case would be brought, Jon Leibowitz, then head of the FTC, acknowledged that "anyone who is in the business of being the chairman of an antitrust enforcement agency would like to bring a big case."
There are winners in the new Google approach to search, but there are losers too, and they would have leaned on regulators to block change. Companies and marketing consultants that perfected search-engine optimization by focusing on which keywords to buy, for example, now must broaden their work to cover the context as well as the content of a search. Other companies suffer from Google's semantic search when it delivers results that answer searches directly, cutting out links to other sites.
Google has gathered "knowledge graph" data on some 500 million people, places and concepts. Amit Singhal, the top Google search engineer, gave the example on the company's blog of deducing what a search for "Taj Mahal" means depending on factors such as what others search or the location of the person doing the search: "You might think of one of the world's most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City . . . or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant."
This innovation without interference from Washington should lead to a rethinking of antitrust laws and regulations. These date from the era of big-is-bad steel conglomerates and railroads—not today's engineers competing to make the most of bits and bytes. The pace of technological change makes it hard for any company to maintain leadership for long; consider the fates of once-dominant Microsoft, Dell and BlackBerry.
When massive antitrust cases were brought against the technology leaders of earlier generations, starting with IBM in the 1970s, the result was suppressed innovation. Executives at these companies didn't want to invite further bureaucratic review by doing anything that might lead anyone to complain.
The billions of people around the world who benefit from better search engines should be thankful there were no government lawyers looking over the shoulders of Google's engineers. Google managed to be left free to innovate, as all companies should be.
A version of this article appeared October 6, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Google Search: Regulation Yields to Innovation.
No comments:
Post a Comment