FTC staff report details how Google favored its own shopping, travel services over rivals
How Google Skewed Search Results
FTC staff report details how Google favored its own
shopping, travel services over rivals
By Rolfe Winkler And Brody Mullins
Updated March 19, 2015 7:25 p.m. ET
A previously undisclosed report by staffers at the
Federal Trade Commission reveals new details about how Google Inc. manipulated
search results to favor its own services over rivals’, even when they weren’t
most relevant for users.
In a lengthy investigation, staffers in the FTC’s bureau
of competition found evidence that Google boosted its own services for
shopping, travel and local businesses by altering its ranking criteria and
“scraping” content from other sites. It also deliberately demoted rivals.
For example, the FTC staff noted that Google presented
results from its flight-search tool ahead of other travel sites, even though
Google offered fewer flight options. Google’s shopping results were ranked
above rival comparison-shopping engines, even though users didn’t click on them
at the same rate, the staff found. Many of the ways Google boosted its own
results have not been previously disclosed.
The report’s insight into Google’s business practices is
still relevant as Google expands its own offerings. Just this month, it
launched a search tool for car-insurance quotes, which competes with similar
tools offered by Allstate Corp.’s Esurance, among others. It has beefed up
hotel listings that compete with TripAdvisor Inc. and Expedia Inc.
The staff report lends credence to longstanding
complaints by Google rivals that the search giant was unfairly discriminating
against them. Local-listings site Yelp Inc., for example, complained publicly
during the FTC’s investigation that Google copied its reviews to give its own
local listings more heft.
The report’s findings are at odds with Google’s
descriptions of its search practices. Then-Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, now
executive chairman, told a Senate panel in 2011 that “he was not aware of any
strange boosts or biases” in Google’s results. “I can assure you we’ve not
cooked” the results, Mr. Schmidt added.
“After an exhaustive 19-month review, covering nine
million pages of documents and many hours of testimony, the FTC staff and all
five FTC Commissioners agreed that there was no need to take action on how we
rank and display search results,” Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in a
statement on Thursday.
“We regularly change our search algorithms and make over
500 changes a year to help our users get the information they want,” Mr. Walker
added. “We created search for users, not websites—and that focus has driven our
improvements over the last decade.”
Google has said that promoting its own specialized-search
services gets more information to users more quickly. That’s more important in
the smartphone age when clicking back and forth from a search page can be
frustrating.
The FTC staff found that Google promoted its own services
in part because it feared losing searches, and advertising revenue, to rivals
such as Yelp and TripAdvisor.
One way Google favored its own results was to change its
ranking criteria. Google typically ranks sites based on measures like the
number of links that point to a site, or how often users click on the site in
search results.
But Marissa Mayer, who was then a Google vice president,
said Google didn’t use click-through rates to determine the ranking for its own
specialized-search sites, because they would rank too low, according to the
staff report. Ms. Mayer is now chief executive of Yahoo Inc. A Yahoo
spokeswoman didn’t immediately make her available for comment.
Instead, Google would “automatically boost” its own sites
for certain specialized searches that otherwise would favor rivals, the FTC
found. If a comparison-shopping site was supposed to rank highly, Google
Product Search was placed above it. When Yelp was deemed relevant to a user’s search
query, Google Local would pop up on top of the results page, the staff wrote.
Other regulators have found similar practices. European
antitrust authorities in 2013 said Google had a different, “specialized” search
algorithm for ranking its own content.
To bolster its own listings, Google sometimes copied, or
“scraped,” information from rival sites. According to the FTC report, Google
copied Amazon’s rankings of how well products were selling, then used that
information to rank its results for product searches. Amazon declined to
comment.
While Google promoted its own results, it sometimes
demoted rivals, the FTC staff found. For example, Google compiled a list of
comparison-shopping sites and “demoted them from the top 10 web results,” staff
wrote. According to the report, Google users in tests didn’t like the changes;
only after Google tweaked its search algorithm at least four times, and changed
the ranking criteria, did the new results get “slightly positive” feedback, the
staff said.
Google’s efforts paid off, the FTC found. It said
Google’s maneuvers reduced Web traffic to rivals, and increased traffic to
Google sites.
Write to Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com and Brody
Mullins at brody.mullins@wsj.com
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