The Official Google Blog has announced that that Google are being investigated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Google say they received notification of the formal review of their business yesterday and will be working with the FTC to answer questions about their services.
Google say that it’s still unclear what the FTC’s concerns are but go on to emphasise in detail that they put the user first and that their ultimate aim to to return the most relevant information to their customers, both for information and in displaying adverts.
Google do of course dominate the search market and the vast majority of their income is derived from adverts placed alongside those search results. They do of course also own a number of other properties such as images, video (YouTube), News, shopping, and maps and these services also feature in Google search results.
The question has to be asked if Google favour their own services above those of their competitors and is this what the FTC are looking into? Of course the corollary to that question is are Google’s other services what users really want to see and if they are the most relevant results then what’s the problem?
5 Responses
I take advantage of every Google product as there are search benefits in doing this. Youtube, gmail, google base, adwords, adsense, etc. It all works better than Facebook for me.
It would be a complete waste of time doing similar within the eBay environment.
eBay may well be looking on with interest as the US Federal Trade Commission may well have similar questions about how ebay search works and the biases shown within eBay given that everybody pays eBay a listing fee.
I don’t see a problem. At the end of the day Google provide a website for me to use, they don’t make me use it, I choose to.
If they favour their own products over others then so what, I would too.
It’s no different to you promoting higher margin items on your ecom site….isn’t it?!?
Google are Number One because everyone is happy to use Google and they give people what they want.
I have my doubts that Google prefers their own services in search. Very often I get Yahoo Finance as the top result when I am looking for Google Finance. The Google link ends up being something like #3.
I’m very happy with Google, I have no complaints at all. I think they give a very good service.