If google where to just use bounce rate as a ranking measure, that's fine -- if interstitials increase bounce rate, then site owners will have to determine for themselves whether it's worth the price. otoh, deciding to arbitrarily lower the rank because they don't like a particular type of advertising is exactly anti-competitive.

So ranking measures derived from user behavior: great. Ranking measures designed to prioritize features in your browser, or to push people away from apps (that, just by total happenstance, your dominant competitor does better than you, and which threaten to undercut your dominance in search/display ads): not fine. Which really is classical antitrust: you can't use your monopoly (search) to juice your other businesses (browser, app store).

Many websites with pop-up ads (Forbes, etc.) display a 2-5s timer countdown to dismiss the ad and view the content, which engages users long enough to stay on the site. This games the bounce rate and would defeat a solution that is base solely on on it.

I don't think you understood, or I wasn't clear.

Users will bounce if they don't like ads, with or without countdown timers. Acting based on observed user behavior is great. If they don't like it, they bounce. If they tolerate it, they don't bounce. Over time, users will migrate to less-annoying sites. Ranking sites on observed bounced rates, whether caused by ads, low quality, or what ever else, is awesome and should have no anti-trust implications. That's not what google did.

After all, if these ads really annoyed users in general, that would show up in their behavior, and thus naturally be picked up on by ranking algorithms, no? (They annoy me, but I'm not all users.)

As search becomes something that society depends upon, start treating it as a public utility.

> without specifying what metrics Google is and is not allowed to use?

Why not? If society depends on something, we regulate it. There are many different possible degrees of regulation, so this is not a boolean condition, even though painting such situations as a boolean choice between pure laissez-faire and nationalizing an industry (instead of merely regulating).

If you don't like this idea, I suggest that Google (or any other business) should find a way on their own to handle the situation (possibly by making their metrics more available, transparent, and verifiable?), or the choice may eventually be taken out of their hands.

Google would break if it were transparent. I'm frustrated by the status quo; I run a site where users who found it through search contact me to say that it should've been higher in the search results. I think this would only get worse if it were transparent, though. Gaming Google would become predictable and mechanized. The outcome would be ugly.

Fraud doesn't become legal just because someone has a clever idea for SEO. You're scenario only works in a totally unregulated environment. Internet businesses are not magically except from the types of regulation found in every other industry. The entire point of a regulation is to place limits on behaviors that harm society when left on their own.

However, focusing on my suggestion of transparency and verification misses the point. The method by which Google regains (and maintains) the public trust is their problem, and I'm sure that more than one solution exists.

My point is it would probably be in Google's best interest to fix this problem, because waiting too long has consequences. At some point, the people who feel that are treated unfairly by Google - it doesn't matter if they are correct in that belief - will fight back, which has already started in small, preliminary ways.

> The outcome would be ugly.

The outcome would also be ugly in a future where a socially-necessary service is controlled entirely by a single entity. As usual in these situations, the best situation is somewhere in the middle.

Gaming Google isn't fraudulent. It's just behaviour that lies outside of Google's guidelines about content on the web. There's no law that says you can't create hundreds of websites using spun content and dofollow links to a page you want to promote; it's completely legal behaviour, probably won't trick Google anymore, but used to, and works as a good example of how benefiting from breaking Google's guidelines doesn't imply fraud.

To your broader point, I agree that it's reasonable to want Google regulated to some degree, though I do fear regulators will take on that "transparent algorithm" point of view, which will just make search terrible. Governments generally aren't very good at regulating tech businesses.