Frank Pasquale

I’ve been interested in the problem of self-reinforcing dominance lately. I’ve written a good deal about this in the area of search engines, but I’ve had less to say of late because I’ve felt that personalization makes it very difficult to study them. But I may be wrong about that; Ben Edelman has some pretty surprising results in a recently released piece:

Search for a stock ticker (example: CSCO), and the three most prominent links on the page — the large-type all-caps ticker symbol, the large price chart, and the left-most details link — will all take you to Google Finance. Google Finance isn’t the most popular finance site; according to ComScore, Yahoo Finance claims that title, and indeed ComScore puts Google Finance in position #60 (as of April 2010). Nonetheless, the three most prominent links all promote Google’s in-house finance service. . . .

It is well-known that the top-most algorithmic link enjoys a large share of search traffic — 34%+ according to Chitika. Meanwhile, even the second link gets less than half as many clicks — less than 17%. If these figures apply equally to Google’s hard-coded links, then every time Google puts its own link first, it takes a third of all available clicks for itself — while cutting by half the traffic provided to the site that would otherwise be ranked first. But Google’s hard-coded links tend to be distinctive and graphic-rich (pictures in Health results, charts in Finance, etc.), so the actual effect is likely to be even larger.

I recently gave a talk called “Search, Speech, and Secrecy: Corporate Strategies for Inverting the Network Neutrality Debate.” We had… Read More »Just Another Company?

Concurring Opinions is sponsoring a symposium on Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet, organized by Danielle Citron. There… Read More »Symposium on Zittrain’s TFOTI