It's no secret that businesses of all sizes have come to rely on search engines to steer traffic to their websites. An entire industry of analysts and consultants specializing in search engine optimization has sprung up to help businesses boost their visibility to Google and its rivals.

But that process is famously opaque: Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) page ranking formula is the product of closely guarded computer algorithms that evaluate numerous factors to determine the order in which sites are ranked in response to various search queries.

That closed process has sparked periodic complaints from businesses and other website operators upset when their sites mysteriously vanish in Google's black box, effectively wiping out a major part of their online visibility.

Critics are quick to note that Google commands roughly two thirds of the U.S. search market, giving its page rank algorithms an outsized influence on the flow of information on the Web.

Those protests were reignited this week with an editorial in the New York Times suggesting that it might be time for the government to exercise some form of regulatory oversight of Google's search engine.

"When Google engineers tweak its supersecret algorithm -- as they do hundreds of times a year -- they can break the business of a website that is pushed down the rankings," the paper warned.

The Times argued that as Google has branched into new business areas such as maps and ecommerce, its financial incentives for playing favorites with Web content have grown apace. The $700 million purchase of online travel service ITA, for instance, might give Google an incentive to demote rival services such as Expedia and Orbitz in its search rankings. That transaction is likely to come under review by antitrust authorities at either the Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission.

The Times would like to see that review include an examination of Google's search algorithms. To be sure, the paper is not advocating rigorous oversight of the sort that would require Google to secure permission from a regulatory authority each time it tweaks its algorithms, which the company says it does an average of once or twice each day.

Nor is it calling for Google to publish its algorithms for the public to see, which it admits would allow site operators to tailor their pages to the specifications of the formula, effectively gaming the system. But it is suggesting that it might be time for the government to take a look in Google's black box to ensure that it's not playing favorites with content.

"Google argues that its behavior is kept in check by competitors like Yahoo or Bing. But Google has become the default search engine for many Internet users," the paper argued. "Competitors are a click away, but a case is building for some sort of oversight of the gatekeeper of the Internet."

The argument for enacting rules of the road for search engines has crystallized around the notion of "search neutrality," which holds that all content on the Web should be indexed and presented on results pages by an objective standard that would preclude Google or any other company from favoring its own content over that of its competitors.

In that sense, the argument bears a resemblance to the principle of net neutrality, which would bar ISPs from prioritizing or throttling access to websites on their networks. Opponents of net neutrality such as AT&T have attempted to couple the two, arguing that if the Federal Communications Commission moves to impose net neutrality rules, they should naturally extend to search engines.

Google, a strong advocate of net neutrality, has argued that likening the contents of websites and online services such as search engines with their distribution over cable or telecom networks is a flawed comparison.

In a guest column in the Financial Times, Google Vice President Marissa Mayer offered a rebuttal to the argument for search neutrality, explaining that the algorithms are an ever-changing labyrinth of calculations that aim to retrieve the best result to a given query. Mayer warned against any effort to regulate search engines, invoking language similar to the rhetoric favored by net neutrality opponents.

"Clearly defining which of any product or service is best is subjective. Yet in our view, the notion of 'search neutrality' threatens innovation, competition and, fundamentally, your ability as a user to improve how you find information," she wrote.

Mayer said that one quarter of the queries performed on Google's search engine "have never been seen before," noting that the company's engineers are constantly at work on updates to the algorithm, particularly as the new types of content such as audio streams and Twitter messages proliferate across the Web.

"The proponents of 'search neutrality' want to put an end to this system, introducing a new set of rules in which governments would regulate search results to ensure they are fair or neutral," Mayer said. "Here the practical challenges would be formidable."

Kenneth Corbin is an associate editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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