Google Instant – Suggesting the most profitable search query

Is it just me or is Google instant clearly an attempt by the big G to suggest to the user what the most profitable search might be. Last December I wrote a post at Galt Networks that discusses the issues surrounding the content control Google has over the general internet using public including the following:

Consider for a moment the power these organizations[Google and to a lesser extent Bing/Yahoo] posses by being able to warp and manipulate the web content you access … how much of what you read and absorb from the net is directly related to what came up in the top 3 Google search results? The reality is that Google and other search engines have significant control over the content you consume, products you buy and knowledge you garner from the Internet.

Google has just moved from holding latent power to influence the results of search in their favor to actively directing the original search with ‘Instant’. This has been happening ever since search engines began suggesting search terms in the process of search however, this move is clearly a dangerous precedent for internet users hoping to find online content using non-biased search. This brings me back to the main point I made in my December posting:

Having a small number of corporations (that are subject to zero oversight and who provide virtually no transparency to their operations) with effective control over the access to information on the internet is an unhealthy and unsafe situation. Add to that the fact that search is a monetized process where it is inherently beneficial to manipulate control over the system both overtly and covertly. ….

And the Solution – Democratized Search
Open source, community driven, peer reviewed, fully transparent, Demonetized search that is managed in an egalitarian manner by a community that has minimal barriers to entry. In essence the Wikipedia of search.