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What was the very First Search Engine to come out on the net?

Is it ethical for a search engine to rank itself first for related searches?

  • If you search 'search engine' in Google in the UK, Dogpile ranks first, Bing second and Google a lowly 6th. This is based on its own algorithm. If you search 'search engine' in Blekko, the first result is Blekko itself. You could easily argue that a company has every right to promote itself on its own platform, but is it ethical for a search engine to do this in organic results?

  • Answer:

    In my opinion, it's a bad move for a search engine to begin manually changing search results in order to rank themselves or affiliates higher. Searchers use their service with the notion, implied or not, that their search will return the organic results of a relevancy algorithm. If the search engine manually sets themselves or an affiliate as a top ranking it makes me think "according to their ranking algorithm they are not the best result for this search query, so they manually fed me a subpar result." Of course, if they are doing it for their own self promotion, it is very possible they are accepting money for other results to be manually ranked higher, thus am I ever truly getting the best results for my search? The exception is if they make it public what results are being ranked separate from the organic. You could make the argument that Blekko does this when you view the ranking details (http://blekko.com/ws/search+engine+/rank), but to me that isn't visible enough. As for being ethical or not? They are a business and doing what's best for them. No laws are being violated. So sure, it probably is ethical although it does probably not have the customers best interest in mind.

Matthias Hager at Quora Visit the source

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I like they way Google does it.  They rank where they rank without messing with the results.  Ethics is kind of tough to pin down.  They may think it is perfectly okay to market themselves or mess with the search results.

Bill Nixon

Of course it is. In fact, I would argue that Google's refusal to rank themselves first is unethical, but forgivable. If you're running a search engine, you hopefully think of yours as the best search engine, at least for some kinds of searches and searchers. Since your goal is to rank things in order of best-ness, if you don't think your search engine should be #1, you should be in a different line of work. Anyone using your search engine thinks it's better than the alternatives. Why would you display an inferior option for them? Google gets a pass, here: they pledge fidelity to their algorithm, and they won't change their title tag to e.g. "Search Engine | Google".

Byrne Hobart

Depends on the terms of service the search engine publishes. When giving a service for free though I find no morale barriers of ranking yourself wherever you please.

Agam Rafaeli

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