There are, of course, many disadvantages to being old enough to remember the music of the 70s intimately–besides the chronic residue of pain Peter Frampton inflicted. For us old fogies:
- mobile is not first
- email still rules
- new technologies are unfamiliar
- sharing rooms and cars is scary, etc.
But on the positive side, we remember:
-Diapers were sold “as a service” (before anything was called “as a service”)
-Cloud computing existed in the form of Compuserve or Lexis/Nexis
-Selling subscriptions (for newspapers which helped pay for college) taught CAC and LTV concepts, as did college economics
-He who controls search, might manipulate the results
It’s this last point that originates this post.
Yelp published a paper this morning with an ex-FTC executive (see abstract below) purporting to show that Google manipulates its results to favor its properties over organic search. This news did not shock me or probably anyone of my age–maybe not anyone at all.
I remember fondly the days when Sabre and Apollo were battling it out in the airline reservation world. Sabre, owned by American, was managing to list all of the United flights on page 2, which was a death sentence then as it is today. (We had to learn that li’l nugget all over again in the late 90s.) In the case of Sabre, it took the government to step in and solve the problem. (BTW, now the three GDS systems (Sabre, Amadeus, and Travelport) are all public, all B2B, and all independent of airlines.)
Of course the EU is now looking at Google search results closely (hence the timing of this paper). Look for the US Government to start looking at algorithms and their biases as well.
Old wine, new bottles. Old whine, new algorithms?
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