It's like that on purpose though. You can't be rude to your customer after all. In this case, advertisers are paying Google a lot of money so they don't have to go through things they wouldn't like, such as harsh verification. Users of Google search aren't really important in the same way. If you lose a couple search users to malware, who cares? At least you got the advert money up front.
I don't think this is their mentality, I think this is more like a myth that gets perpetuated ad nauseaum.
The problem with a search engine is that there's no lock-in other than brand recognition. Google won over AltaVista and Yahoo by being superior. I still remember the first time I tried it, it was so much better that it made an instant convert out of me, even though typing "altavista.com" was rooted in my nervous system and this was in the days before they were big, before AdSense/AdWords/AdX. And I could see it at Internet Cafes catching like fire, within mixtures of technically oriented and unsophisticated users alike.
And it can happen again. What pains do normal users have when using Google lately? Malware, content farms, "aggregators", too many ads. The only reason for why Google is still number 1 with a near monopoly is because there is no better alternative. DuckDuck Go is awful for me. Bing too. You may not notice how awful they are, unless you're living outside the US.
And I'm pretty sure they know that they can lose users fast. And once a significant chunk of users are gone, advertisers will be gone too. That's why Android exists in the first place, though distributing Bing as the default doesn't really help Microsoft, so having your own platform only protects you against walled gardens. And there's even a bigger danger therein. Google doesn't even have to lose users for advertisers to leave - Google already knows that the majority of clicks on all served ads are done by a minority and advertisers are increasingly aware of this fact too, as quality conversions are going down. This is because targeting is not so good after all and because users are increasingly fed up with spamy results and annoying ads that aren't targeted well.
I think their problem is that they are trying to solve this through algorithms only. The problem with algorithms is that algorithms can be gamed, you only need to find the ranking formula, which can of course be done through trial and error. It's a whac-a-mole game basically.
But for popular searches, like Firefox, they could have exceptions in there to propel those as first results. Is it not obvious that users searching for Firefox actually want Firefox, the browser from Mozilla.com, in spite of Mozilla.com's ranking? Is this against their policy or something? And now that they have Google+ accounts, why don't they add a "Report Result" button? If flagging email as Spam in GMail works so well, why didn't they do the same thing for their search engine?
"The problem with a search engine is that there's no lock-in other than brand recognition."
This is not quite true. The 'lock in' are the advertising channels. If you want to replace Google you need replace their lock on advertisers. I have direct visibility into the effectiveness of Google's, Yahoo's, Microsoft's and third party advertising networks, I can state with certainty that if Microsoft was able to show Google advertising feeds on their search property, even with Google taking 20 - 30% off the top, it would be Microsoft's most profitable division, swamping the profits from either the Windows licensing stream or the Office licensing stream.
Your point about _advertiser_ lock-in is true in the short term.
However, the limited _user_ lock-in means that a 'better' search engine could take user share, which would then make it more attractive to advertisers.
Well in my case (@Blekko) I'm a startup that has worked at taking market share from Google organically. We actually crawl the web and index it, and that takes hardware and network bandwidth. I recently had the opportunity to look again at what a 'small' cluster would cost to run in EC2 (about $2M/month so $24M/year). We don't do that, since it would be impossible to make any money if we did, but even just break even on that sort of investment is hard to achieve without advertising support. Trust me when I say that the search advertising business is very much a sausage factory.
You're just a startup so you're money strangled, but $24 million is pocket change for other companies - so what stops a bigger company that already have their own data-centers and enough talent, such as Microsoft, or Apple, or Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever, to create a better search-engine? I think that's simply because it's a very hard problem to solve.
Thanks. Is the point that it's chicken-and-egg? You need users to get ad revenue, but you need ad revenue to improve search quality and thereby attract users?
