Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2011; Google’s first-quarter 2011 revenue and the pending complaints reflect that moment. The antitrust story developed a great deal afterwards, including an FTC investigation, EU fines and a US DOJ case filed in 2020.
Google’s business is basically advertising, through its AdSense and AdWords programs, and its search engine returns two kinds of results. On one side are the normal results, produced by an undisclosed algorithm that measures the relevance and importance of the pages that make it to the top of the search. On the other are the paid results from its AdWords program, where advertisers bid for the top positions.
Google has already been in the authorities’ sights for monopolistic practices, and a court spent months examining whether its search engine was completely neutral towards certain companies.
Now a growing number of companies have accused Google of manipulating search results and of charging them higher rates than other companies to appear in its “paid” results.
According to these companies, they can’t get into the top positions even when they pay.
Google, for its part, has issued a statement explaining that its search algorithm measures which results are most relevant. So if a company appears near the bottom, it may be because of fraudulent practices aimed at gaining an unnatural ranking, or simply because the algorithm judges it irrelevant to what the user is searching for.
Even so, Google has set aside $500 million of its first-quarter profits to deal with possible lawsuits, while stating that the company does not manually censor any results in its search engine (except in cases of bad practice).
Google’s revenue for this first quarter came to $8 billion.
Featured image: APK, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
