In the first meeting of my Journalism & Technology practicum a student asked an interesting question: ‘What happens if you publish a story that the search engines don’t find or ignore?’
At the time I didn’t really appreciate the full implications of the question. But later that evening on the phone with a reporter asking about Pay Walls I started to wonder: As much as we concern ourselves with Net Neutrality, should we be equally concerned about Search Engine Neutrality?
What will happen if Microsoft’s Bing search engine really does pay Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for exclusive access to his company’s news content? Will Bing weigh stories from USA Today, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal equally? If I paid millions for the right to include the Wall Street Journal in my search results I might weight that more heavily. What about similar stories from the New York Post and the Daily News?
I am not excited about a world in which the search engines change their model from relevancy to exclusive partnerships. This may not be very different from what the Satellite and Cable operators do, but that model doesn’t work well for consumers either. And access to out of region NFL games seems less important to democracy than access to a variety of voices around important news stories.
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