>It's actually worse. Well hold on. We can go ahead and talk about how different this Google statement is from their ethos in the present day. But the framing

>It's actually worse. Well hold on. We can go ahead and talk about how different this Google statement is from their ethos in the present day. But the framing of this being about ad placement was incorrect, and that has nothing to do with anything. >They're suggesting/hinting that those competitors accept payment for placement when in fact that wasn't happening It wasn't? This strikes me as yet another completely out of left field reaction. I mean, is there a consensus that that's obviously false? A source? Where is this "in fact that wasn't happening" coming from? Was there a big media cycle where there was a deep dive investigation into this that settled the question, that everyone remembers except me? There's a whole field of actors who at one time were relevant: Jeeves, Lycos, Altavista, Infoseek, Dogpile, Hotbot, Webcrawler, etc. And they went through any number of permutations of design, ownership, were sold and reacquired and it stands to reason that at some point some versions of these did things that Google is suggesting. At a minimum it seems prima facie plausible that competitors entertained this.