Transparency is tricky – and I’d say despite talk of transparency, as you say, there’s a fair amount of opaque on that slide…

Like most, I’m addicted to google for web search as well – it’s far too easy to “just google it” – even though, as someone covering enterprise search, I make sure I change it up from time to time and specifically explore alternative tools, both personally, and in presenting options as examples in research documents or literal presentations.

For anyone to ever believe their own marketing so deeply as to not question their status, is the path topples giants. Recall Hotbot? Excite? Altavista? Excite could do no wrong, for a while, until the wheels fell off.

Academic economists often suggest that they are doing something like science, but a closer inspection of consumerism shows that the supposed “rational choice” is anything but rational: it’s more like higher-primate consumption patterns or something (and there is, for the few empirically-inclined among us, data suggesting that consumer preferences often operate sort of unconsciously, if not in some nearly Darwinian fashion). Veblen had suggested as much a few decades ago, with his theory of “conspicuous consumption.” (perhaps not “true in all possible worlds”, but accurate in most market contexts).