Google Said to Be Possible Target of U.S. FTC Antitrust Probe

Google Inc. (GOOG)’s dominance of the Internet-search industry is being considered for a broad antitrust investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, two people familiar with the matter said.

Before proceeding with any probe, the FTC is awaiting a decision by the Justice Department on whether it will challenge Google’s planned acquisition of ITA Software Inc. as a threat to competition in the travel-information search business, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is still confidential.

An FTC investigation of Google, the world’s most popular search engine, “could be on par” with the scope of the Justice Department’s probe of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) a decade ago, said Keith Hylton, an antitrust law professor at Boston University School of Law. Google “could fight the FTC, but that’s going to cost a lot of money and time.”

The FTC and Justice Department share responsibility for oversight of antitrust enforcement, and the outcome of the ITA deal may determine whether the two agencies will vie for control of a broader probe of Google, the people said. The two agencies sometimes negotiate which will handle major antitrust investigations, with the decision turning on their respective expertise.

The Justice Department may soon announce its decision on Google’s purchase of ITA, said the people familiar with the matter.
Commissioner’s Support

FTC Commissioner Thomas Rosch said in an interview last month he supported a probe of the dominant players in the Internet-search industry, without specifying which companies. Rosch, one of two Republicans on the five-member commission, is the only commissioner to say publicly that such an investigation is in order.

The people familiar with the matter said any investigation of the search industry should concentrate on Mountain View, California-based Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine.

If consumers don’t like what the company is doing, they can switch to another search engine, said Adam Kovacevich, a Google spokesman.

“Since competition is one click away on the Internet, we work hard to put our users’ interests first and give them the best, most relevant answers to their queries,” he said in an e- mail. “We built Google for users, not websites.”

Cecelia Prewett, a spokeswoman at the FTC, and Gina Talamona, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-05/google-said-to-be-possible-target-of-antitrust-probe-after-ita-acquisition.html

Google Lets Users Block Websites in Search

Google announced yesterday it will begin letting users block certain websites on its search results. By clicking the “Block” link below a website’s label (see above), users will not see the website appear in any future search queries.

Users can also manage their blocked websites and choose whether to unblock it (see below). Blocked websites are part of a user’s Google account, so it will be transferable across devices.

Previously, this feature was only available as a Chrome extension, but Google has now rolled it out to Internet Explorer and Firefox users.

“We’re adding this feature because we believe giving you control over the results you find will provide an even more personalized and enjoyable experience on Google,” wrote Google’s Amay Champaneria and Beverly Yang

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http://www.designtaxi.com/news/34250/Google-Lets-Users-Block-Websites-in-Search/?page=2

Google claims Microsoft is copying its search results

Google accused Microsoft on Tuesday of copying its search results for use in Microsoft's Bing, then the two companies bickered about it on stage at a San Francisco search conference.

Google, the dominant search engine, said Microsoft is using Internet Explorer 8 features to track what Google users are searching for, then copying those search results on its own search engine.

The Mountain View, Calif., company went so far as to conduct a "sting" operation, manually planting search results for gibberish terms. Those same results later showed up in Bing search results for the same gibberish.

On a company blog, Google said it wants Microsoft to stop the practice.

Microsoft acknowledged it uses IE8 and a Bing toolbar to track user information but said it's just one factor in determining Bing search results. Harry Shum, a corporate vice president for search at Microsoft, referred to Google's sting as a "spy-novelesque stunt."

The allegations were first reported Tuesday by the site SearchEngineLand.com. Later, Shum and Google principal engineer Matt Cutts argued over them on stage Tuesday at the Farsight 2011 conference in San Francisco. Their appearance, for a scheduled discussion on the future of search, was webcast.

The tiff underscores how competitive juices still run strong in search, which Google dominates with a 66.6 percent share of the U.S. market in December, according to comScore. By contrast, Microsoft had 12 percent and Yahoo, whose search engine Microsoft now runs, had 16 percent.

In the Farsight discussion, Cutts explained how Google determined Microsoft used the Bing toolbar and an IE8 "suggested sites" feature to track searches done on Google, then copy those results in Bing.

He confirmed that Google inserted fake search results on certain terms only to find them later on Bing.

"It's almost like a mapmaker that inserts a fake street and sees if that street gets copied or if a Yellow Pages inserts a fake number," Cutts said.

Shum did not deny that the Bing toolbar or IE8 features track data, adding that all search operations track customer behavior.

"We learn from our customers," Shum said.

"We have been very clear we use customer data. My understanding is other search engines also use a similar thing."

Cutts countered, "I'm not sure users realize that by installing the Bing bar or installing suggested sites on IE8 that those results are encrypted and sent to Microsoft."

Shum then criticized Google about online spam, saying, "I think Google, as an industry leader, would be responsible for a lot of spam we receive."

Google has been hit with privacy complaints that it tracks what people search for. By saying Microsoft is using its browser tools to track users, Google appeared to be trying to paint Microsoft and Bing with the same brush.

On Tuesday, Google issued a statement from Amit Singhal, a Google fellow:

"At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there, from Bing and others — algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results copied from a competitor."

Microsoft also posted a blog item, from Shum, that said: "To be clear, we learn from all of our customers. What we saw in today's story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking. It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we'll take it as a backhanded compliment. But it doesn't accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."

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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2014102094_binggoogle02.html

Google Acts to Eliminate Distasteful Web Sellers

Google announced on Wednesday that it had changed the way it ranks search results so that unscrupulous merchants would find it harder to appear prominently in searches.

The change was prompted by an article in The New York Times on Sunday about Vitaly Borker, a Brooklyn-based online seller of eyeglasses. Mr. Borker claimed that he purposely shouted at and frightened some of the customers at DecorMyEyes.com because the online complaints actually worked in his favor in Google search results.

In essence, he claimed, Google’s search engine is unable to tell the difference between positive posts and withering online critiques. Therefore, the more complaints posted about Mr. Borker’s site, the more likely customers would be to find his store ranked high on a Google search, which yielded him more revenue.

In a blog posting titled “Being bad to your customers is bad for your business,” Google said that it had revised its algorithm so that it could detect Mr. Borker and “hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide extremely poor user experience.”

Google did not reveal how it had changed its algorithm, or how that change would affect online sellers like Mr. Borker. It simply said that the more it reveals about the changes it made, the easier it will be for unscrupulous sellers to game it.

“We can’t say for sure that no one will ever find a loophole in our ranking algorithms in the future,” Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, wrote on the blog post.

“We know that people will keep trying.”

With the changes, Mr. Borker has already had a harder time pushing DecorMyEyes to its previous high rankings on Google. The store once showed up on the first page of a search of “Christian Audigier” and “eyeglasses.” As of Wednesday night, it was not in the first 20 pages.

Mr. Singhal said that the change was made after the company read in The Times about the ordeal of Clarabelle Rodriguez, who bought a pair of glasses and contact lenses from DecorMyEyes in July.

When she tried to return the frames and get a refund, Mr. Borker (using one of his favorite pseudonyms, Tony Russo) commenced a campaign of phone and e-mail harassment.

That included threats of litigation and chilling statements like “You put your hand in fire. Now it’s time to get burned.”

He also sent a photograph of the front of her apartment building, and in a separate e-mail wrote “I AM WATCHING YOU.”

Ms. Rodriguez went to the police several times and on Oct. 27, Mr. Borker was arrested and charged with aggravated harassment and stalking.

He is set to be arraigned on Dec. 22.

The Internet is rife with consumer complaints about DecorMyEyes, and even the quickest search of the store’s name yields dozens of outraged testimonials.

In July, Ms. Rodriguez’s search used only the brand name of the glasses she wanted. DecorMyEyes was at the top of Google’s main search page.

“We were horrified to read about Ms. Rodriguez’s dreadful experience,” Mr. Singhal wrote in the blog post. “Even though our initial analysis pointed to this being an edge case and not a widespread problem in our search results, we immediately convened a team that looked carefully at the issue.”

Exactly how Mr. Borker wound up so high in Google searches has been a matter of online debate. His theory is that the great mass of grievances on all those highly regarded consumer complaint sites were the key to his success.

Google cast doubt on that idea, saying that consumer complaint sites typically include special coding along with the mentions to the companies in question so that such links do not count in the companies’ favor in search results.

At the blog Search Engine Land, Byrne Hobart also wrote in a recent posting that the review-generating strategy was not the driver of Mr. Borker’s success. His analysis found that Mr. Borker benefited chiefly from various “black-hat tricks” to improve his site’s standing, including links from what he called auto-generated spam pages. He also found that the store was frequently linked to by mainstream media sites — The Times included — when references were made to high-end eyeglasses.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/technology/02ranking.html

Ask.com Retires from Search Battle

If you've been on the web for almost a decade now then you'd know that Ask.com was one of the initial search engines which were equivalent of Google back then. Okay, does Ask Jeeves ring any bells? According to AFP reports, Ask.com is laying off 130 staffers located in U.S. and China. The company plans to refocus on its Question and Answer service that involves real humans to answer questions. Looks like Ask.com is going to be pretty literal.

Leslie Cafferty, a spokeswoman for Ask's owner IAC, said the move was a part of a strategic shift by Ask to focus on its Q&A service rather than the traditional search, which is dominated by Google with over 66 percent share of the U.S. search market. But now, Ask is going to concentrate on its new Q&A based service that was introduced back in July this year.

Last week, Ask.com launched its Q&A services for mobile devices starting off with an iPhone App. The company plans to go big on the Q&A service which is deemed to compete with the Quora.com which was founded by Ex-Facebook CTO and VP of Engineering - Adam D'Angelo with Charlie Cheever who led the Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform.

But the demise of Ask.com won't stop any more search engines to give up. We recently reported about Blekko search engine based on Slash technology and there might be many more to come. Not every search engine would come out to compete with someone as big as Google or Microsoft Bing. As of now, let's observe a moment of silence for Ask.com's search engine and look forward to its Q&A service.

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http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Askcom_Retires_from_Search_Battle/551-113429-643.html