Biases of the Google Monopoly

I guess the big news of the day is that the GOP leaders hauled Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, before Congress. In the pieces of the hearing I saw, the GOP complained about a bias against conservatives.

This is a problem; however, I think there is a underlying bias in Google that is more pernicious than its preference for the left to the right.

Google has a really nasty habit of favoring large centralized sources to smaller local sources. I am often surprised at how many times I am unable to find the web site for a small business in Google.

The bias for the big and loud to the local and soft spoken affects us in many ways. For example, during the 2016 Republican Primary, it was difficult to find good stories on most of the GOP candidates as all searches related to the GOP primary were dominated by stories about Donald Trump.

The Democratic primaries had the same problem. Google searches tend to favor members of the Democratic Establishment to the mavericks in the party.

In the realm of political opinion, partisans tend to fair better in Google searches than independent voices.

These biases can be explained the lauded Google Algorithm. Since Google is a private company, the biases can be dismissed as a matter of free speech.

The problem, of course, is that Google has a virtual monopoly on search and search engines end up controlling access to information. Political action in relation to the monopoly should be looked into.

I happen to have a substantial grievance against google.

I will admit upfront that I have a bias to things that are small and local to things that are large and centralized.

I decided to express my bias by creating a collection of community directories. I started this process in 1999. I use the brand Community Color. My directories serve the Mountain West.

The sites had a guide, online forum, calendar and directory for local communities. Since I have no funding, I cut out the guide, calendar and forum and just have the directory.

I have manually edited directories. The goal of the directories is to list every single site I can find. This is a time consuming process. I spent about 15 minutes researching each site in the directory. through the years I've added over 50,000 links and have deleted over 20,000 broken links.

I listed tens of thousands of events in the calendars before giving up on that.

Maintaining such sites is time consuming. I wanted to hire a minimum wage worker to do this, but I have never found a solid source of ad revenue.

I had a suggest a link page, which I had to remove because it was too time consuming.

People could add a link. My policy was to give free links to all local non-profits, art organizations and blogs. I asked local stores and businesses for a $10.00. I would get about 50 such donations a year.

About a decade ago; Google sent out a communique that said that if web sites were caught paying directories for listings; that Google would penalize their sites.

I immediately received hundreds of requests from desperate web masters begging me to remove their links. The $500 a year I was making with donations dried up as well as people feared that Google would read the email from the paypal account and penalize them for donating to small local directories.

The thugs at Google directly threatened webmasters who were donating to my site. This cost me the little $500 a year I was making for listing local web sites and events on my site. I've been unable to make any direct sales since Google's threat because people fear if they pay for an ad on my site, it would affect their listing in Google.

Googles monopolist actions caused thousand of small independent directories and some small newspapers to fold.

This is not a matter of free speech. Google threatened to shadow ban advertisers who bought ads in local news sites or who bought listings on local directories.

Google has since moved in and now dominates local search and the independent newspapers and directories that they displaced are pretty much gone. My collection of directories is bankrupt. No-one will buy advertisements on local directories when webmasters fear that google will shadow ban them for using products by competitors.

The picture is not a video. It is from the Congressional Hearing by C-SPAN. These images are public domain. Here is their policy

I wish people would occasionally read local newspapers and look at local geodomains.

Google did engage in a campaign that was specifically designed to destroy local geodomains in their efforts to dominate local search. Now that people have started questioning the biases of Google, I suspect that a good lawyer could make a decent class action suit against google.

I have no resources. I am bankrupt and can do nothing.