Meanwhile, it seems now the Commission has also opened its antitrust investigation against Google with regards to its deploying the apps in Android OS.
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In reference to Google’s anti-competitive behavior, Wu told Re/code: “The main surprising and shocking realization is that Google is not presenting its best product”. The local reviews company – and longstanding Google adversary – built a browser plugin meant to recreate Google’s organic search page stripped of its OneBox, the listings and map pairing Google began inserting in 2009 for searchers that triggers local results. The line of accusations points back at Yelp, with Google officials declaring that “This latest study is based on a flawed methodology that focuses on results for just a handful of cherry-picked queries”.
“Our findings suggest that Google is – in some instances – actually making its overall product worse for users in order to provide favourable treatment to Google content”.
Yelp’s vice president of public policy, Luther Lowe said that they have expected that these announcements have timely given the active inquiries in such issues by anti-trust enforcers. They showed two versions of search results for local business searches, which according to the study represent roughly one-third of desktop search volume and over one-half of mobile search. The three entities are claiming that Google is highlighting their own services on people’s search results, instead of the supposed objective results that people expect when they enter a search term. This time, Google has until mid-August to make a defense to the antitrust allegations in Europe. Considering almost 2700 subjects, randomly, almost 45% more users were inclined toward the results in the second version, i.e., the one without OneBox, featuring organic results, as the study illustrates. Google calls such blending of results from its own specialized search engines into general search results “universal search”. In fact, studies have shown that users usually don’t click on a search result ranked lower than fifth place.
Google is allegedly degrading its search results to favor its own properties, argues a paper co-written by Columbia Law School professor and author Tim Wu.
By the time the study was complete, Wu completed a 180-degree pivot in his stance on Google’s Search practices. Yelp asked to pay an study lead by Tim Wu, known lettering the word “Net Neutrality”, and also their getting minces no thoughts. Other companies frequently do the same. I guess in the future we will need to say search at your own risk… This could be one of those things despite all of the sabre rattling going on.
The paper was delivered at the Antitrust Symposium at the Oxford University.
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Google uses a merit-based algorithm for determining which content goes into Search’s answer boxes – the tiles that list three to seven local results and plot them out in a preview pane of Google Maps. “The demonstration of consumer harm is, we think, an important conclusion…that should influence any competition law analysis”, they wrote in their conclusion of the work.
