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Google Faces EU Probe Over Doped Search Results
Barence writes "The EU has launched an investigation into whether Google is deliberately doctoring its search results to favour its own services. The search giant stands accused of artificially lowering the search ranking of competing price-comparison sites in organic and paid-for search results, in favour of Google Shopping. 'There is a growing chasm between the enduring public perception of Google's search results as comprehensive and impartial, and the reality that they are increasingly neither,' said Shivaun Raff, CEO of British price comparison site Foundem, which lodged the complaint with the EU. Google has denied any foul play. 'Those sites have complained and even sued us over the years, but in all cases there were compelling reasons why their sites were ranked poorly by our algorithms,' it claims."
...an old story? I'm pretty sure Google is on the line though.
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
I shop online all of the time. I've never heard of this "foundem". Furthermore, the last two paragraphs are pretty telling:
Addressing Foundem's allegations specifically, Google said: "We built Google for users, not websites, and the nature of ranking is that some websites will be unhappy with where they rank. Those sites have complained and even sued us over the years, but in all cases there were compelling reasons why their sites were ranked poorly by our algorithms.
"For example, Foundem, one of the sites that has complained publicly and to the European Commission, duplicates 79% of its website content from other sites, and we have consistently informed webmasters that our algorithms disadvantage duplicate sites."
You're not ranked high because you're not relevant to the users' interest. 'Nuff said.
I'm pretty sure any company would have turned towards that in the end. I think the problem will be proving it. Since google know pretty much how their ranking algorithm works - I'm pretty sure they can design a site which always turns up top - without needing to 'cheat'.
I'm not sure who's side I'm on this time. I mean, it'd be stupid if (say) you google something on Bing and you don't get the Microsoft solution first. I think it'd be weird if you look up "Shopping" and google shopping is at the bottom.
I really hope Google wins this one. Google search results are spammed with enough useless "price comparison" and "vertical search" sites as it is, their results really don't need any more - especially not forced upon them by Google. It's reached the point where it's very difficult to find actual reviews for certain products or sites selling them via Googling already, because the "vertical search" sites don't care about actually providing good information. (If you read Google's response, the reason the company complaining got automatically downranked is because nearly all their content was duplicated - like many such sites, they offered absolutely nothing useful and were just sponging off their ability to draw people in by getting as high in the Google results as possible.)
"There is a growing chasm between the enduring public perception of Google's search results as comprehensive and impartial...
Impartiality Checklist
[ ] Do they make money doing it?
[ ] Do they support a political candidate, viewpoint, or party?
[ ] Is what they're doing taxable?
[ ] Do they claim to know the truth, as opposed to still searching for it?
Note: If you checked any of the boxes, you can be certain they are not impartial.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I've heard the "Pro-europe" argument once or twice. The best response I found is that Opera is Norwegian which isn't in the EU.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7301299/Google-under-investigation-for-alleged-breach-of-EU-competition-rules.html
This is just more of the same from Microsoft when trying to compete.
Agreed - these price-comparison sites are almost universally leeches. They provide no added content, the contents are often out-of-date, and you can get the same functionality by just clicking on individual links in Google. I wish they would all go away. That said, I have never seen Google shopping come up in the results of a search for a product. I am always skipping over spammed results from other price comparison sites - not to mention eBay (I hate eBay). If Google is cheating, they surely are doing a lousy job of it :-)
According to one article, Foundem is a case study in SEO fail. Perhaps it's easier to sue than to fix your business concept.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
This shouldn't even be an issue. Is there a law that says search engines must be impartial? This is their company and their algorithm. Who the fuck has the right to tell them if they want to optimize it to make all websites with the word google in them go up in rank?
If their search results stop giving useful and valid results someone else will build a new and better search engine. See the history of search engines as a reference.
Google is not a public utility, they are a for profit company.
1) Google makes it explicitly clear that its services are being pushed to the top of the results - say a section labeled "Google services" on an off-white background, much like it does with sponsored results.
2) End users aren't bothered by this in the least, and Google profits go up another notch.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
It's a pity web directories such as the Open Directory Project have fallen by the wayside in the mind of the general public. (Alexa ranks dmoz at No. 460.) If a web directory had the same personal investment end users worldwide give Wikipedia it could provide a useful alternative to algorithm-based search engines. Although Wikipedia already is a web directory of sorts, with links to relevant sites at the end of articles, as well as numerous "list of" articles pointing to sites you might never encounter searching through Google.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Sorry to say, but that article was written by a clueless moron who just argues that any price comparison site must fail at SEO, which a) is obviously wrong and b) would mean that Google Products would also never warrant a top position since all its content is as problematic as the author wants to make us believe Foundem's is.
Google Products is actually much better. Compare this Foundem search and the per-product pages with Google Product and its per-product pages. The Google pages offer more useful information up-front, avoid redundant duplication, and are generally better designed.
Even this probably wouldn't warrant a top position for Google Products on most searches, and it doesn't generally get one. What Google does is use it to supplement its search results - if you make a search where Google thinks the Products search results are useful, it displays them as well as the generic web search results. This makes sense - Google wants to offer the best web search results it can, and sometimes that means presenting them in the Google Product format.
Note that Bing does exactly the same thing with ciao.co.uk, which Microsoft also owns and which was one of the other complainants. Except that Microsoft totally screwed this up - the ciao.co.uk pages lack useful information like prices and website names, making them less useful than generic internet search!
It's no wonder that Bing and ciao.co.uk have a much smaller marketshare than Google - they're useless.
Why wouldn't Google push their own products to the front of search results? Are they barred from doing what we would expect from every other company in the world to do? Why is this investigated? Why does anyone consider this illegal, amoral, or wrong in any way? They can't promote their own products on their own website - Why the hell not?
They are not a nonprofit impartialsearch.org, they're not the government shoving this down our throats, they're a large corporation that is completely optional to use. There is no reason to expect their own products not to be first in every related search. There are Google logos on every page - it's not deceptive, you know who is providing this information. There is nothing illegal or wrong about this in any way, shape or form. It's companies with crappy products that lose money politicking/suing Google because they have money - That is the total sum of these stories. There's no rights violations, illegal activities or sketchy dealings here, just unmitigated greed and a failed political/legal system.
If Google didn't do this, if you searched for "Email" on Google and the first result was Hotmail, everyone would think they're complete idiots - employees, users, advertisers and competitors.
This sentence no verb.