I take it you refer to "Google started out as an almost benevolent index of the world wide web, showing users ten blue, unbiased links for whatever users were searching for."
Leaving aside whether it's true or not, this could be interpreted more charitably. Search results are necessarily biased to provide relevant links, based on some definition of "relevant". We can interpret "unbiased" in this context to mean that content providers cannot introduce "bad" bias (e.g. by misrepresenting their actual content, by paying for ads to indirectly boost placement, or directly paying for placement, etc.).
Yeah, I was just trying to politely point out that this article is dumb and the author fails to make their case.
Take the example of the basketball dribbling video. The insinuation is that Google serves YouTube results because Google is biased; it owns YouTube. The claim is that Google should mix in results from Vimeo. This supposes that there are worthwhile results on Vimeo, that Google can index them, and that people want to see them. The refutation of this bias claim is pretty easy. If you do the same search on Bing, you get the exact same results, all from YouTube. So whatever causes these results to be 100% YouTube, it cannot be explained by Google's bias.
The second flaw in the argument is the idea, which all SEO people hold dear, that a search engine exists to serve the content providers, and that they somehow owe a debt to middlemen. This is not the case. The search engine serves the querier. When I search for airfares from New York to San Francisco, it makes sense that a search engine serves the underlying data about the flights and their prices. Air travel is provided by airlines, not by Expedia. Travelocity, Orbitz, and Kayak are not naturally occurring "organic results", they are grifting middlemen who use dark patterns to chisel a few dollars out of people who just want to fly.
I don't think the author's issue was that youtube results were ranked highly, but that they took up a much larger amount of screen real estate. Look at the screenshot in the article - half the page is one youtube video, then there's a video bar (all youtube, perhaps coincidentally) which is twice as tall as the last, non-youtube result.
I just produced a search result that puts a Vimeo video in the carousel at the top of the page. It was difficult, because Vimeo sucks and nobody uses it, but it proves that the arrangement of junk on the SERP is origin-neutral. The top result gets a bigger box.
Leaving aside whether it's true or not, this could be interpreted more charitably. Search results are necessarily biased to provide relevant links, based on some definition of "relevant". We can interpret "unbiased" in this context to mean that content providers cannot introduce "bad" bias (e.g. by misrepresenting their actual content, by paying for ads to indirectly boost placement, or directly paying for placement, etc.).