The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece
from Nextag CEO Jeffrey Katz, calling Google a monopoly and slamming
the company’s business practices. This is nothing new, of course. We see
these types of complaints all the time, and various government bodies
continue to give the company a hard look.
The European Commission has even given Google a July 2 deadline
to come up with changes to its search results. A Google spokesperson
told WebProNews, “We continue to work cooperatively with the European
Commission.”
Do you think Google should be regulated? Let us know in the comments.
Google, apparently recognizing the huge audience Katz’ piece was
likely to find, decided to address the article in a blog post, and
dispute six of the claims he made. Google SVP, Engineering, Amit Singhal took on the argument.
“Let me be very clear: our unpaid, natural search results are never
influenced by payment,” Singhal writes. “Our algorithms rank results
based only on what the most relevant answers are for users — which might
be a direct answer or a competitor’s website. Our ads and commercial
experiences are clearly labeled and distinct from the unpaid results,
and we recently announced new improvements to labeling of shopping
results. This is in contrast to most comparison shopping sites, which
receive payment from merchants but often don’t clearly label search
results as being influenced by payment.”
“As we’ve said many times before, we built search to help users, not
websites,” he writes. “We don’t make changes to our algorithms to hurt
competitors. We make more than 500 changes a year (each one
scientifically evaluated) in order to deliver the most useful results
for our users – and we now publish a monthly list of algorithm
improvements. Every one of those changes moves some websites up and some
sites down in the rankings, but the most important thing is that users
are happy with the results.”
“Our algorithms are always designed to give users the most relevant
results — and sometimes the best result isn’t a website, but a map, a
weather forecast, a fact, a quick answer, or specialized image,
shopping, flight, or movie results. And that’s not just Google; Bing,
Yahoo and other search engines do the same thing,” he continues.
“All major search engines — including Bing and Yahoo — long ago
evolved beyond the simple ‘ten blue links,’ and we believe that our
users are often best served by providing better answers directly in
search results,” he adds. “And if users don’t like our results, they can
try Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or even Google Minus Google.”
In the WSJ piece, Katz wrote, “Google should grant all companies
equal access to advertising opportunities regardless of whether they are
considered a competitor.”
Interestingly enough, I saw a Microsoft ad while searching through my
Gmail earlier today. I saw one again in the middle of writing this
article, while viewing an email about Google.
Look what I get when I search “search engine” in Google:
Singhal addressed this part of Katz’ argument as well: “We don’t
prohibit competitors from advertising on Google — in fact, many of our
largest advertisers are also competitors. Our auction-based advertising
system, which takes into account relevance and bids, is designed to
provide a level playing field on which placement is not automatically
awarded to the highest bidder.”
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