They should go back to working on their own "Google killer" search engine :) http://www.infoworld.com/article/2672709/operating-systems/e...
They want the algorithm disclosed as a legal matter to determine whether competitors are disadvantaged. Which probably means they are more interested in email than source code. There exist hyperintelligent lawyers. Yes, smart enough to understand search. A law firm like Keker and Van Nest [1] could go in there and answer the question. France could be willing to spend a billion to find out, and that's more than they need.
Legislation of technology is frightening to any technologist. But it's much more dangerous if we dismiss the process as ridiculous and refuse to recognize any underlying concerns. Because then technologists won't have any say in the outcome.
EDIT: Paul you're such a prominent guy, I don't mean to speak too strongly, but people really listen to what you say. Entrepreneurs ought to know that legal matters are not so easily dismissed. I do hope, generously speaking, the startups are the ones that call KVN and not the legislators.
So has google put a finger on the scale to rank google properties more highly? Based on their behavior with the results page (vs yelp, for example), I would be surprised if they do, but not very surprised.
Nonetheless, now that google search results are the internet for many people -- and chrome's address bar is used to help blur that distinction -- it's fair that people outside google, represented by governments, start having a say in who shows up and where. That's what happens when you're a monopoly.
It is slightly ironic that bing is the best thing that's happened to google in a decade. Where it not for Balmer deciding to play search engine, google would be known to be a 95+% monopoly in the US as well. Bing allows them to pretend they aren't (though on my blog, for example, 99.28% of ~7k search referral visitors comes from google.)
Given access to the data, or more ideally the ability to rapidly batch query, one could ask does being a google owned or rev-share site affect rankings? And if so, up or down? These are the questions statistics is made to answer.
edit -- and it doesn't even necessarily need be hardwired. For example, google could have more visibility into site interactions on google owned or tooled (GA) sites, and that could tend to lead to lower serps. Ie just the presence of certain features, only available to google when google owns or tools a site, could tend to produce lower ratings no matter what those features are. This is, I would argue, dirty pool for what is effectively a monopoly. And statistics can answer these questions.
Lower latency to the user should. If, ceteris paribus, google sites are lower ranked then yes, that should be illegal. ie consider regression and compute I[google] + site_speed; after controlling for site speed, being a google owned property shouldn't matter. It's fine if google owned sites tend to be faster and hence are more lowly ranked.
I specifically meant more along the lines of google can view your navigation through GA tooled sites, and there is a wealth of information that can be derived from that.
The other has to use force. That's all they know how to use. Its their solution to every problem.
I don't think anybody is suggesting they are simpletons. Unfortunately, French lawmakers are fairly tech-illiterate on average (as demonstrated by the recent vote for the mass surveillance law).
That said, I kind of agree with you. Investigating Google is one thing, asking for them to spill their trade secrets is another.
What we need is not to be involved in matters of law, but to have a mutual defence treaty that will ensure the law doesn't get to steal and redistribute what we make. France needs Google, but to Google France is just one customer - and they should treat them accordingly.
Another open question is what degree of disclosure is being requested from Google. Suppose Google just give them the daily dump of weightings and such from the machine learning systems. Does that qualify as disclosure? They may have a hell of a time trying to figure out whether there is any bias in the system using that. They may just refuse to believe how complex the system is, and think that Google is being difficult.
Furthermore they already published their search engine algorithm: http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
And again, you might as well be saying "just because cats are complex doesn't mean they're not biased, and if nobody's allowed to audit them, we will never know". Even Google probably doesn't know the specifics of what their engine has learned.
The reason is clear. You might want Google to have that power, or dislike the concept of antitrust, but the reasoning for the action is straightforward.
It's also useful to open a link from Word. Do you see any reason why Microsoft should make it possible to open it in anything else than IE?
The way the game works is that you can get away with vertical integration and anti-competitive behaviour as long as you are not in a situation of monopoly. Then the rules change.
Searching for an address is a special case of search. If you search for an address, you're unlikely to get useful results by just searching the web, unless the address happens to be that of a business who lists their address on their site; even then, the result you want from the address is probably a map or directions, rather than the site for the business at that address. So what, precisely, would you suggest Google or another search engine do in that case to continue providing a good user experience? (Answers such as "don't do that" are obviously wrong, as are answers like "go to extra trouble to build a generic search plugin API and make users explicitly select a map provider". Neither of those provides a satisfactory experience for users.)
Clearly, there is a competitive advantage in controlling the browser, or Google would not have spend so much money in giant billboards in the Paris subway to explain how Chrome was better than anything.
> So what, precisely, would you suggest Google or another search engine do in that case to continue providing a good user experience?
Agree with map service vendors on a standard API, and make it possible in the settings to select the service to handle an address search. You know, competition and all that.
See the Sherman/Clayton antitrust acts and the long list of related SCOTUS rulings.