Internet users who have witnessed the rise of Google as the dominant search engine remember what the Web was like before it. Other engines like Altavista did search with varying degrees of success and user satisfaction.

Google’s arrival relegated Altavista and everyone else in search to second place status, if they were lucky. Their rise in search, coupled with a fortuitous entry into relevant contextual search advertising, made it a multi-billion dollar fixture on the Internet.

No one has been able to budge Google from its top spot in search. A discussion of their longevity began when their chief economist, Hal Varian, took questions from readers of the Freakonomics blog.

Varian cited one question as being “quite striking.” Being cynical types here, we think the particular question is just a little too good to be true; it reads like this:

How can we explain the fairly entrenched position of Google, even though the differences in search algorithms are now only recognizable at the margins? Is there some hidden network effect that makes it better for all of us to use the same search engine?

Our pals at Intentional Foul might call this a softball question, which Varian took for a ride out of the park. He responded on the official Google blog to chat about it further.

“The difficulty is that the typical economic forces at work in many technology businesses that lead to entrenchment don’t seem to explain our success,” he said. “If it isn’t economies of scale, lock-in, or network effects, what is it that explains Google’s success?”

The professor answers this by saying Google is better because it keeps doing search improvements continually. He refers to a theory economists call “learning by doing” and what the rest of us might call “practice.”

“Google has been searching the web for nearly 10 years, which is far longer than our major competitors. It’s not surprising that we’ve learned a lot about how to do this well,” said Varian.

We are inclined to think inertia plays a part in keeping people coming back to Google. Index freshness has a role, which we see as even more important. Search at Yahoo, or Microsoft, or Ask works fine, but if Google has even more recent results to tap, that gives them as much of an edge as any ongoing improvements.

But one important distinction: readers hate them. They want the full Monty.

So we have a rather classic debate between publishers ensuring their business model and content consumers who neither care nor appreciate the cost of the content they are consuming. The consumer, knowing they have a certain amount of power over the providers, are naturally, unabashedly, justifiably selfish,

And why not? So’s the other side, right? You sell it, I buy it, that’s the way it works.

It’s not an indictment, then, of how the model works, or of media-consumer relationships, that we need to examine. Instead, web content producers, as usual, have to consider the consumer and their business model with a rather precarious sense of balance – after all, the consumer is not responsible for it, nor should she be. The consumer is only responsible for judging and responding, and she is a temperamental mistress.

This relationship was most recently explored when the New York Times acquired the popular Freakonomics blog, an extension of the popular book of the same title. The Freakonomics reader has been a loyal one and has enjoyed, up until the big sale, full RSS feeds.

The NYT promptly switched to partial feeds in an effort to increase page views. Assumedly, unlike traditional print, subscriber numbers just weren’t cutting it (or perhaps are more difficult to manipulate, but that’s a whole other topic).

And now, as might be expected, Freakonomics subscribers are upset and are threatening to unsubscribe if the NYT is going to destroy what made RSS feeds beneficial to the end-user in the first place.

Globe and Mail tech writer Matthew Ingram, writes, "The bottom line is this: if I wanted to click through to the website, then I would just go to the damn website in the first place. Partial feeds defeat almost the entire purpose of reading RSS feeds in the first place."

He points to a commentator on the Freakonomics blog that argues the defeats-the-purpose point, while noting that partial feeds come off as "rude" and "greedy." In addition, it means fewer readers in the long run, as subscribers judge two lines of text and decide on whether it is worth their time to gamble with the "click-and-wait" game.

TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick takes the argument to the next level at the TechDirt blog, saying that though it sounds counterintuitive, full feeds actually increase page views:

It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.

Google had passed around a few hundred copies of Freakonomics (we immediately wondered if the order would be counted as a bulk sale, and therefore underweighted on the N.Y. Times best-seller list), so now, looking across the long rows of chairs, you could see one Googler after the next with the open book in his/her lap, as if preparing to hear a speech from Chairman Mao. It was, well, freaky. A bit like happening upon your own funeral.

The biggest laugh came when Levitt mentioned that we spoke at Yahoo! a day earlier and got a much smaller crowd. That was true; Google’s turnout was about double Yahoo!’s. On the other hand, that means Google may have lost twice the productivity (unless you think that our talk may have somehow increased productivity).

For more: Guest Bloggers: those Freakonomics Guys

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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