Google is under fire for possibly manipulating search results to favor paying advertisers, but they don't seem too concerned about the criticisms; obviously they say they're not true, but Amit Singhal, Google's Senior Vice President of Engineering, suggests that people who don't like Google's can go use Bing.
The argument got started when Jeffrey Katz, the CEO of Nextag, accused Google of unfairly manipulating search results in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He even went so far as to call Google a monopoly. Google, Katz says, "has shifted from a true search site into a commerce site."
Katz says that Nextag's traffic data, which it handed over to the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, makes it easy to tell when Google makes a change to its algorithm.
Google's Singhal responded by systematically dismantling Katz's argument over at the Google Public Policy Blog. We're not going to reproduce every paragraph here, but the gist of things is, unsurprisingly, that Google does what's best for users, and doesn't manipulate search results for any other reason.
The surprise comes when Singhal suggests that "if users don’t like our results, they can try Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, or even Google Minus Google," even providing links to each service. If that doesn't show how much Google cares about its customers, we're not sure what does.
Is Google manipulating its results? Who knows; Katz hopes that it'll be resolved soon, since Google only has until July 2nd to respond to the EU's antitrust concerns. We're curious, though; what do you make of Singhal's statements, and Katz's criticism? Let us know in the comments section below.
Source: Google Public Policy Blog | Wall Street Journal
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