A recent investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has risen, insinuating that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) have purposefully worked to keep competitors at bay and not listed them in top results – amending algorithms to demote competitors.
Countless claims have been made over the years with statements claiming that Google demoted competitors to increase their own market share. The Wall Street Journey obtained a report o the investigation completed by the FTC and hoped that the FTC would go ahead with an anti-trust law suit; however in 2013, the commissioners chose to settle with Google, rather than forge ahead with legal action.
An article published in the Wall Street Journal as to “How Google Skewed Search results” created a stir, revealing that Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) was black listing competitor shopping sites on purpose to boost its own sites. If a competitor shopping site was due to rank highly, the Google shopping site was then placed above it. Having said this however, it was known that other search engines were doing the exact same thing – implementing “vertical search listings” as a means to get a higher ranking.
Vertical search allows you to search across a vast range of interests from shopping to swimming, news and sport, however, what appears was going on, was that using the Google search engine was only bringing up “Google” results. Although some have claimed that this is unfair, others have said that it isn’t unfair, it is simply being – “smart” – a search engine that does what it should do.
After failed attempts of finding an algorithm that was one sided and only reflected the interests of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL), in 2007, Google found an algorithm that demoted comparison shopping engines if ONLY more than two appeared in the top ten. As an example of this, if there were more than two options, Google would demote them so that no other option was above the top two, but if there was one or two – they would leave them.
