This commentary from John Dvorak in that latest issue of PC Magazine (February 6, 2007) is scary. He speculates that if a company such as AT&T or Comcast bought a search engine company like Yahoo, it could change your results so that they’d display not by relevance but by how much a company had paid or to benefit the self-interest of the owning company. He dubs this losing “search neutrality,” a play on words from the “net neutrality” debate going on in Congress. He calls the potential to skew results “corruption” and a “threat to democracy,” since search engines with control over your results could manage to swing an election. For those of us engaged in serious research, we already worry about our results being influenced by the SEO (search engine optimizer) contingent. Having the search engines themselves altering the order in which results display (if you move them down low enough, most people won’t scroll down to find them), possibly even suppressing results, could doom our use of the Internet for research.

Small search sidenote here: I had the physical issue of PC Magazine in my hands for about a week before it showed up online. I mentioned this in my editorial that will be published in the March/April 2007 issue of ONLINE.