[lbo-talk] The lure of commercialization (was Re: About Twitter)

[// ravi]

On Aug 15, 2009, at 12:15 PM, Itamar Shtull-Trauring wrote:
>
> However, a well documented example of such a process does exist:  
> Google.
> In the first paper they published about the search engine, then an
> academic project, Brin and Page explain that one of their goals is to
> provide an alternative to commercial search engines:
>
>       Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search
>       engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business
>       model do not always correspond to providing quality search to
>       users. ... For this type of reason and historical experience
>       with other media, we expect that advertising funded search
>       engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and
>       away from the needs of the consumers.
>
>       ...we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed
>       incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search
>       engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
>
> (from http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a)
>

Great find!

	--ravi