New Study Accuses Google of Anti-competitive Search Behavior

An anonymous reader writes: Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu — the man who coined the term "network neutrality" — has published a new study suggesting that Google's new method of putting answers to simple search queries at the top of the results page is anticompetitive and harmful to consumers. For subjective search queries — e.g. "What's the best [profession] in [city]?" — Google frequently figures out a best-guess answer to display first, favoring its own results to do so. The study did some A/B testing with a group of 2,690 internet users and found they were 45% more likely to click on merit-based results than on Google's listings. Wu writes, "Search engines are widely understood as key mediators of the web's speech environment, given that they have a powerful impact on who gets heard, what speech is neglected, and what information generally is reached. ... The more that Google directs users to its own content and its own properties, the more that speakers who write reviews, blogs and other materials become invisible to their desired audiences."

Comments

Re:Not surprising and probably not a problem

[bluefoxlucid]

Wu claims Google's first informational result is a "search result", rather than differentiating between content and information searches. Google isn't providing its own result first; it's providing an answer to a semantic question.

There are three types of searches: Official contact (what is the home page of Microsoft?); research (find me a bunch of information about lions); and simple information (what time is it in Brazil?). Google often gives any simple query related to a particular entity an Official Contact result first (e.g. searching for Windows 10 will give you the Microsoft page for Windows 10 first), and starts with a Simple Information result if the search looks informational (e.g. what is the national animal of Scotland?).

Wu fails to differentiate, instead seeing a search engine as a research platform: if you ask for any topic, you are asking for a library of writings on the topic, rather than trying to find a specific and utterly small piece of information.

I use bing because I don't want there to be one...

[Karmashock]

... search engine.

It was really painful initially because bing used to be garbage. I would try searches on bing first and if it was failing which was frequent in the early days then I'd switch back to google for that search and then go right back to bing.

These days bing and google do a equally good job so far as I can tell.

All that said, I miss Altavista. :)

I felt they were just as good as google in the old days. I don't know why google ultimately dominated altavista. They talk about their magical algorithms but every time they're explained in detail it turns out they're neither mysterious nor especially different from what anyone else was doing.

Maybe I'm missing something. I haven't researched it extensively. I've just looked a few in depth explanations of the system as well as years of anecdotal experience with the various engines. Google became better than everyone else but that only happened AFTER they became popular. Altavista was initially as good or better. I think one of the funnier things to go down was the whole war over the google bar versus bing bar. Most people don't know this but the top search engines rely heavily on what amounts to spyware which is used to determine what sort of page you actually wanted to see when you typed in whatever into the engine.

Google got upset with MS because they were supposedly copying google's results. But what had happened was that people with the bing bar were using google and so the bing bar learning from that and inputing the results into the bing system. Google accused MS of intentionally copying them. But it was just the stupid bing bar.

Google of course does the same thing with Chrome etc... and of course the f'ing tracking cookies and javascript are ridiculous these days.

No script and cookie monster for the win.