Hope you’re feeling lucky...
Google buys up companies that present a nascent competitive threat to search or the critical technologies they depend upon.
Users expect search results to be presented in order of relevance. However, Google displays many of its own pages at the top or in the middle of the results page as if they were natural search results, without clearly identifying them as Google results.
Google scrapes the content developed by other websites and displays it on a Google page. This enables Google to earn advertising revenues and to deprive the other website of user traffic.
By locking in advertisers to its platform and handicapping them with a “quality score,” which can be lowered without warning and with little or no justification, Google can manipulate paid search to limit competition.
Users expect search results to be presented in the order of their likely relevance to a query. But now, Google’s own sites compete with vertical sites, incentivizing Google to prefer those rankings, instead of simply ranking and listing the most relevant results.
Google has maintained and expanded its dominance in search and search advertising by imposing exclusivity restrictions on its partners.
If you use the Internet to search for information, chances are you use Google to do it. But there is more to search than meets the eye.
In fact, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. That’s why the U.S. FTC, the European Commission and several U.S. state AGs are currently investigating Google’s anticompetitive search and search advertising practices.
Take a look around to learn more.
