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Google Accused of "Cooking" Search Results and Charging MSFT Too Much
A reader writes "Google is being scrutinized by the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee for supposedly 'cooking' their search results. In an independent study comparing search results for products, Google Shopping consistently ranked 3rd. Eric Scmidt denied these accusations at a Senate hearing Wednesday." On top of all that, Microsoft is alleging that Google overcharges them as much as fifty-fold for advertising prices as compared to other buyers.
Where the competition will do literally anything, including tipping the ears of politicians with insanely expensive lobbyist to run you through the mud.
I don't know or care if these accusations about Google are true.
I think the more important question is why should the government care about how Google is running their search results. They are the dominant search engine, but there are other competitors in this space and other alternatives.
Yet another example of government pushing its nose into something it doesn't understand in the name of the public good.
Several reasons.
If it results in false advertising, there can be a false advertising claim under the Lanham Act by a competitor or the FTC. unlikely in this kind of case, but Google has been investigated in the past for making money off of that kind of thing, and the same agency is doing the investigation here.
In addition, there's antitrust law. Merely having other competitors in the space doesn't mean that a company isn't violating antitrust law. The concern of antitrust law is protecting against anticompetitive use of a firm's market power in a way which reduces competition--in simple terms, doing this takes away from the total benefit that society obtains from the marketplace, because it results in the firm with market power artificially raising prices, meaning that the company demands more and produces less while people pay more for products the company would have been willing to produce for less had it not manipulated the marketplace--effectively, people lose the benefit that reflects the difference between the old price and the new price, and fewer people buy because it costs more, and the company doesn't gain as much as the consumers lose. So it's generally a net loss when a firm abuses market power.
Antitrust law doesn't always protect against monopolies, because it doesn't prevent people from using economies of scale or integrating their supply chain. It does, however, sometimes result in regulation even in markets that are or seem to be oligopolies.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
He failed to explain why Google results always came 3rd on product comparisons though.
The entire interview can be watched here .
Your definition of cooking is not the only, or even most, reasonable one. Sure, a search company can devise whatever algorithm it wants, but I think people have come, rightly or wrongly, to expect a baseline of impartiality in results from Google. If we define "cooking" against that expectation, it could include any tweaking that biases for or against certain pages because of Google's other interests. Ranking their own services higher in the results than where they would appear if a single algorithm were applied across the board would then be "cooking."
The question of what to do about this is a separate one. I might, for example, decide that the best course of action is to publicize Google's actions so that users of their search will be aware of this bias. There's no need to leap from pointing the practice out to legislating a master algorithm.
.sig withheld by request
This isn't antitrust. If you are using Google's services, then you have a choice immediately and obviously accessible; direct your browser to a different website. The Microsoft antitrust suits were more about them bundling IE with their OS, which forces the user to use it, even if it's only to download another browser. This activity, combined with the fact that it was incredibly difficult (some would say impossible) to purchase a PC at the time without a Windows(tm) license attached to it meant that they were leveraging their OS dominance to push their other software, which is how they got in trouble. If Google wants to link to Google services at the top of their search results, so be it. If Google wants to charge Microsoft one hundred million dollars for a single-line advertisement... hell, if Google wants to tell MSFT to go fly a kite, then so be it.
Last I checked, businesses were still able to define their own prices (in most cases), and to sell (or not sell) their products and services to whomever they want to.
Why should Google let MSFT advertise in the first place? This would be akin to a television station selling advertising space to a different television station.
Microsoft got slapped on the wrist for being a bully, and is now trying to be a tattletale and get the other kids in trouble.
--
"Sit them in the corner, mommy, they won't let me break their toys!"
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Cause Microsoft is one of the biggest funders on Capitol Hill !!!
..
"Microsoft's chief Washington lobbyist has been convening regular meetings attended by the company's outside consultants that have become known by some beltway insiders as "screw Google" meetings
Microsoft is trying to harm Google in the regulatory, legal, and litigation arenas because they're having problems with Google in the competitive marketplace." link
Friendly reminder:
Google's services aren't free. Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa, all the other "services" you're referring to aren't their services. Google sells advertising.
Search is completely impossible to not have a bias. If it did so, it wouldn't be a search, it'd be a table of contents and also completely useless as a search. If they rank their own shit higher, well, that's their choice.
Of course there's no purely objective search. But if Company A builds into their algorithm that their own pages will always appear among the first five results, for example, it seems perfectly sensible for a Company B to point that fact out and say "We never do that. We rank all pages on the basis of a formula that does not consider who provides a particular web page," it would be a selling point for at least some consumers.
.sig withheld by request
You are confusing their product with their customers. You, who use their free services, are not Google's customer. You are their product. They use their free search engine and other services to entice you into viewing pages. Otherwise, they could care less about you. Their customers are the ones who buy ad space on those pages that you view. Check out their prices; they are far from free.
They collect information about you (the product) and your actual or inferred buying habits to attempt to make their ad placements more relevant, so they can charge their customers even higher prices for them.
I don't see Bing advertising Google nor Microsoft advertising Linux. It took many, many years and literally millions of dollars in fines for them to simply remove Windows Media Center from EU versions of Windows.
I think Google has explained before how part of their algorithm works - if the site is faster, it's higher ranked. Since Google -> Google crawling is probably in the sub 10ms delay range, it will be higher ranked.
Google does not have a monopoly, get over it already.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You are not the customer, you are the product.
That is neither relevant nor interesting. A more interesting question is whether the bias is deliberate and targeted or not.
Here's a target practice analogy: When you shoot darts at a target, you won't get all darts in the bullseye. You might even find that your darts land more often in the lower half of the board. That's bias, and it's not deliberate.
Now suppose that a champion throws some darts, and his darts all land in the upper left corner of the board. That's bias too, but it's clearly deliberate and targeted. If moreover there's money riding on the game, and the champion was expected to win, then there's a case for cheating.
In both cases, it's completely impossible to not have bias, ie to hit the bullseye every single time always.
Google was accused of cheating a client today.
Those bastards!
The client in question was none other than Microsoft.
Those magnificent bastards!
It does. The accepted meaning of the phrase had changed in common usage, and this new meaning is not in any way inconsistent or erroneous. If anything, it is more literal and less an of an idiom, as a given line of reasoning indeed requires a certain question to be asked at some point. Take into account that the original meaning came from Latin, and was a very bad translation to begin with.
http://begthequestion.info/
"To beg the question does not mean "to raise the question." (e.g. "It begs the question, why is he so dumb?") This is a common error of usage made by those who mistake the word "question" in the phrase to refer to a literal question. Sadly, the error has grown more and more common with time, such that even journalists, advertisers, and major mass media entities have fallen prey to "BTQ Abuse."
While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists are content to allow the misconception to fall into the vernacular, it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must constantly distinguish between the traditional usage and the erroneous "modern" usage. This is why we fight."
As has been said before, there are many ways to say "this is a question which needs to be asked". It is not necessary to take a definition of a logical fallacy and repurpose it so that its original useage is diluted.
I not surprised to see this on other sites, but on slashdot, where many people are coders who live by the knowledge of precise definition of terms, I am.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine