A report related to Google search result skewing resurfaces

Mar 20, 2015 12:21 GMT  ·  By

The giant search engine is well known for manipulating search results, although Google has denied any such accusations, claiming that it offers unbiased services for its customers.

However, critics have claimed that Google was indeed promoting its own products and those of companies which paid for this kind of services by restricting their smaller competitors.

The accusations led the Federal Trade Commission to take action regarding the matter. Although it was proven that Google had indeed skewed its results, no legal action was taken against the company, leaving many people wondering what had actually happened.

New information resurfaces

According to the Wall Street Journal, there were some key people from FTC who wanted to sue Google for the unfair treatment towards small competitors, but Google’s response gave them no other choice than to drop the accusations.

Based on the leaked report that Wall Street Journal has acquired, Google was revealed to have promoted its own sites at the expense of other rival companies such as Yelp, TripAdvisor and Amazon.com.

Once the truth was out and all these other companies asked Google to provide its customers fair search results, they were met with strong disapproval and were threatened with the removal of their products from the search list.

As a conclusion, FTC stated that "evidence paints a complex portrait of a company working toward an overall goal of maintaining its market share by providing the best user experience, while simultaneously engaging in tactics that resulted in harm to many vertical competitors, and likely helped to entrench Google's monopoly power over search and search advertising."

In order words, FTC was perfectly aware of how Google’s self-promoting decisions affected other companies, and even though there were some members of the staff who would have opted for a legal trial, the overall decision was that a legal battle would be unnecessary.