The complaint seems to boil down to how Google deals with spammers. The question is, how is competition going to make it better? If we instead had five search engines that each had 20% market share, would people stop trying to game them? Would false positives in efforts to thwart spammers be eliminated? How?
The problem isn't even one that responds to market forces -- the "victims" (sites that should rank highly in organic results) are no one's customers. If you want to flip the script, they're the product. They have no leverage, and having more search engines leaves them with still no leverage. Only the users of the search engine have leverage because they can switch to another search engine -- but they can do that today. The problem is the alternatives are no better.
What we need is a cost-effective accurate way to identify spammers and exclude them from high rankings in search results. Someone who could do that more effectively could challenge Google, because there is a market for spam-free search results. But if that was an easy problem to solve then why hasn't Google solved it? They have the right incentives. It's just not easy, because spammers adapt. Whenever a search engine does something to thwart spammers, the spammers do something different.
Having more search engines doesn't make it easier, it makes it harder because each search engine has less resources to dedicate to it and they have to duplicate each other's work, and the cost to sites of legitimate optimization for a larger number of search engines increases which creates an even larger advantage for major institutions over small timers who can't afford the higher cost.
It's silly to say "why doesn't Google do X" and list some abstract thing you think would solve it which they've already considered and declined to do. There is probably a reason. Maybe manually curating every website is too expensive. Maybe arbitration proceedings would be overrun with spammers trying to challenge legitimate removals of their spam. And if they're wrong, don't speculate about it on a blog, prove it by building a better search engine. So far no one has been able to do it.
You falsely assume a new search engine can only be "as good as Google". Google's search has become highly commercialized over the years, it used to be about finding the "best" answer to your search query (the "original" PageRank), but it has increasingly become the "best consumerist" answer to your query (where to buy something). This make it more susceptible to spammers, as their basic incentives are similar. New, different, search engines might try another approach, perhaps less personalized, less commercialized, and less mass-media oriented, and be less of a "petri dish" for spammers.
Most of his complaints are reasonable (some aren't), what's happening is that Google is not evil enough for them not turning into actual damage. But if you distance yourself from the current context, you'll be able to see how the means Google use to deal with spammers are dangerous, and we are betting the Internet on Google not being evil (or somebody replacing them fast after they do become). Things would be better if we had 5 search engines with 20% market share.
But then, I completely agree that just complaining about the issue is useless. Anybody that (thinks that he) can build a competitor for Google will try it or not based on his odds of success, tolerance to risk, etc, not because somebody is complaining.
The problem isn't even one that responds to market forces -- the "victims" (sites that should rank highly in organic results) are no one's customers. If you want to flip the script, they're the product. They have no leverage, and having more search engines leaves them with still no leverage. Only the users of the search engine have leverage because they can switch to another search engine -- but they can do that today. The problem is the alternatives are no better.
What we need is a cost-effective accurate way to identify spammers and exclude them from high rankings in search results. Someone who could do that more effectively could challenge Google, because there is a market for spam-free search results. But if that was an easy problem to solve then why hasn't Google solved it? They have the right incentives. It's just not easy, because spammers adapt. Whenever a search engine does something to thwart spammers, the spammers do something different.
Having more search engines doesn't make it easier, it makes it harder because each search engine has less resources to dedicate to it and they have to duplicate each other's work, and the cost to sites of legitimate optimization for a larger number of search engines increases which creates an even larger advantage for major institutions over small timers who can't afford the higher cost.
It's silly to say "why doesn't Google do X" and list some abstract thing you think would solve it which they've already considered and declined to do. There is probably a reason. Maybe manually curating every website is too expensive. Maybe arbitration proceedings would be overrun with spammers trying to challenge legitimate removals of their spam. And if they're wrong, don't speculate about it on a blog, prove it by building a better search engine. So far no one has been able to do it.