In 1998 the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, published their vision of their new search engine: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. The hope and idealism of their youthful endeavor has given way to whatever it is Google has become now.

In Appendix A of the document, Advertising and Mixed Motives, the two founders of Google detail what they think a substandard, biased search engine would look like.

“The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.”

“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”

“Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who “deserves” to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed.”

“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.”

“Search engines have migrated from the academic domain to the commercial. Up until now most search engine development has gone on at companies with little publication of technical details. This causes search engine technology to remain largely a black art and to be advertising oriented. With Google, we have a strong goal to push more development and understanding into the academic realm.”