Has Google, the search engine most of us use, become so big and influential that in all honesty, we can and must as a society bring to the forefront perhaps the most important questions 
which are not easy to answer. Are Google search results unbiased or not and is Google using its search dominance to favor its own offerings at the expense of competition, especially if consumers were to be misled by Google’s display.
When seeing this judiciary subcommittee hearing with chairman Eric Schmidt “Oversight of Google”, I realized that there are some questions I already knew the answer to, but also questions I did not.
A clip where the complexity is tangible, about what a search result really is.
Some of them are:
- Are Google products and services offered by Google subject to the same search ranking algorithmic process as all other organic search results.
- is Google presenting information that users want or are they presenting information they’d want you to see based on its commercial interest?
- Does Google have a responsibility if they are presenting search results in a biased way, to notify the consumer that a certain search might favor preferred venders or advertisers?
- Is it in the consumers interest that Google now is manufacturing phones, has the Android operating system and has several dominant Android apps that might be preloaded?
- Is it a bad thing that Google is so big and powerful and dominant?
- Is Google rigging its results biasing in favor of Google Shopping and against competitors?
The hearing has 14 speakers. Most have a critic stand about Google but they ought to be a judiciary subcommittee. If you want to watch the videos, every speaker has its own clip.
In favor of investigating further:
- Thomas Barnett 02:14:14 A THREAT THAT WITHOUT GOOGLE TAKING ACTION TO RESOLVE THESE ANTI-TRUST ISSUES, MAY CAUSE SIGNIFICANT ELEMENTS OF THE INTERNET TO BECOME SUBJECT TO INTRUSIVE REGULATION BY GOVERNMENT?02:46:16 MR BARNETT, YOU HAVE HAD VERY SIGNIFICANT ANTI-TRUST ENFORCEMENT EXPERIENCE COMPARABLE TO MISS CREIGHTON’S, YOURS AT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE AS HEAD OF THE ANTI-TRUST DIVISION, AND I WONDER IF YOU COULD TELL US WHAT YOU THINK AND YOU HAVE NO RESPONSIBILITY TO ANSWER THIS BUT IF YOU WERE IN THAT POSITION NOW, WHETHER YOU WOULD BRING A CASE. OR AT LEAST BEGIN AN INVESTIGATION?
- Richard Blumenthal 01:33:02 YOU KNOW, THE RACETRACK ANALOGY, YOU RUN THE RACETRACK, YOU OWN THE RACETRACK, FOR A LONG TIME YOU HAD NO HORSES, NOW YOU HAVE HORSES, AND YOU HAVE CONTROL OVER WHERE THOSE HORSES ARE SEEM TO BE WINNING.
- Al Franken 02:24:27 COULD YOU ANSWER MY QUESTION?– DID GOOGLE PAY — THE DID GOOGLE PAY APPLE TO BE ON — THE DEFAULT SEARCH ENGINE?
- Jeffrey Katz WHY SHOULD IT MATTER HOW YOU’RE BEING TREATED BY GOOGLE’S SEARCH ENGINE? 02:33:34ONE, IF THEY’RE GOING TO CREATE A PLACEMENT OR LINK ANYWHERE ON THEIR PAGE, IT SHOULD BE NEXTAG’S EASY ABILITY WITHOUT CHANGING OUR BUSINESS, WITHOUT BECOMING SOMETHING WE AREN’T, THAT WE CAN GET ACCESS TO THAT LINK OR THAT AD UNIT. SECOND, THEY WOULD LABEL MORE CLEARLY. 02:39:04 THOSE UNITS THAT YOU PULLED OUT THAT ARE TOP DEAD CENTER IN THE PAGE, THOSE AREN’T LABELED AS COMMERCIALLY PREFERENTIAL TO GOOGLE.
- Jeremy Stoppelman 01:57:55 LET’S BE CLEAR, GOOGLE IS NO LONGER IN THE BUSINESS OF SENDING PEOPLE TO THE BEST SOURCES OF INFORMATION ON THE WEB. 01:58:03 GOOGLE HOPES TO BE A DESTINATION SITE ITSELF FOR ONE VERTICAL MARKET AFTER ANOTHER INCLUDING NEWS, SHOPPING, TRAVEL, AND NOW LOCAL BUSINESS REVIEWS. 01:58:13 IT WOULD BE ONE THING IF THESE EFFORTS WERE CONDUCTED ON A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD BUT THE REALITY IS THEY’RE NOT.
- Michael Lee 00:34:31 IT SEEMS TO ME, FOR WHATEVER IT’S WORTH, WHEN I SEE THIS — WHEN I SEE YOU MAGICALLY COMING UP THIRD EVERY TIME, THAT SEEMS TO ME THAT — I DON’T KNOW WHETHER YOU CALL THIS A SEPARATE ALGORITHM OR WHETHER YOU HAVE REVERSE ENGINEERED ONE ALGORITHM. 00:34:43 BUT EITHER WAY, YOU’VE COOKED IT.
- Charles Schuman 00:42:21 WOULD YOU AGREE TO CONSIDER THE HUDSON VALLEY AS A FUTURE TEST SITE FOR YOUR BROADBAND PROJECT?
- John Cornyn 00:44:30 THE NONPROSECUTION AGREEMENT BETWEEN GOOGLE AND DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE DATED AUGUST THE 19th BASICALLY GOOGLE ADMITS TO HELPING ONLINE PHARMACIES ILLEGALLY SELL HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF POTENTIALLY COUNTERFEIT AND TAINTED PRESCRIPTION DRUGS TO U.S. CONSUMERS. 00:44:48 RESULT, AS YOU KNOW, GOOGLE PAID A — WHAT IS REPORTED TO BE ONE OF THE LARGEST CRIMINAL PENALTIES LEVIED IN COOPERATION IN U.S. HISTORY, $500 MILLION.
- Chuck Grassley 01:01:56 HERE’S A QUOTE FROM SOMEBODY THAT SUPPORTS GOOGLE. 01:02:00 HOW WOULD YOU RESPOND TO THE IOWAN WHO WROTE “FURTHER RESTRICTIONS ON SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES LIKE GOOGLE ARE THE SUREST WAY TO IMPEDE INNOVATION, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, ULTIMATELY THREATENING ANY SUSTAINABLE ECONOMIC RECOVERY.”
Not in favor of investigating further:
- Susan Creighton she’s the least in favor of regulating, she foresees that the people can or will make their own choice but there she goes wrong, most people aren’t prudent when it comes to the internet, speed and comfort is what drives most of the populace and this plays Google right in their hands.
- Eric Schmidt (of course)
Unbiased:
Herbert Kohl, Dianne Feinstein, Amy Klobuchar.
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Firstly, you can say a lot about Google since they’re so prominently present on the internet. I do agree that their products and services fulfill to a great extend the needs of the consumer 
and therefore Google is so successful, they seem to know what the public wants. But is that really true? Is Google adhering to the wishes of the public or is Google feeding the public novelties that they hope the people in great numbers will use so that Google learns much more about its consumers by using their products and services. How much data has the mother ship on each IP-address and can use it to pin point which hobbies or interests the individual behind this IP-adress has. Of course Eric Schmidt tells us that Google has only benevolent intentions or if you will guidelines to inform their consumers as quickly as possible and to their satisfaction. Mr. Schmidt explained on the hearing that Google adheres to the following principles:
Google’s principles:
- always put consumers first.
- focus on loyalty, not lock-in.
- be open, not closed.
- be transparent.
Now these principles anyone can embrace, they could have been written by James Madison himself, but the reality is that there are some major facts we can’t deny, Google has like any company commercial intentions, their search results revenues last year alone tallied up to $30 billion and is extending each year along with the number of employees which is a good thing. Google has a 45% growth in employment, even in the economic downturn from the last two years (1,000 to 28,000 employees) and in December of 2010 they bought one of the largest office buildings (2.9 million square feet) in Manhattan.
Google is successful and they have every right to be, most of us use at least their search engine. But this hearing is about if Google uses its power and dominance in favor of its own products, allegedly biasing search results. If so, this would be harmful to the competition in search engines like Microsoft’s Bing, Microsoft’s two-year old search engine, is losing nearly a $1 billion a quarter, with no sign of letting up (has less than 30% of the market as to Google’s 65% more in searches and Google made $29 billion in 2010).
Raising questions:
- Are Google products and services offered by Google subject to the same search ranking algorithmic process as all other organic search results.
- is Google presenting information that users want or are they presenting information they’d want you to see based on its commercial interest?
- Does Google have a responsibility if they are presenting search results in a biased way, to notify the consumer that a certain search might favor preferred venders or advertisers?
- Is it in the consumers interest that Google now is manufacturing phones, has the Android operating system and has several dominant Android apps that might be preloaded?
- Is it a bad thing that Google is so big and powerful and dominant?
- Is Google rigging its results biasing in favor of Google Shopping and against competitors?
On the other hand Google has made an initiative called the Data Liberation Front that makes escaping from Google products as easy as possible. Takeout lets you take your data out of multiple Google products in one fell swoop. This is a good thing, but what bugs me the most is the privacy issue. The Data Liberation Front can transfer your data if you’d like, an excerpt from their page:
Why are you doing this? What’s the catch? We’re doing this because we want our users to stay with us because they want to. While locking users in is a way to keep them in the short term, we believe that the way to keep users in the long term is to keep innovating and making our products better so that they choose to stay with us. And besides, if someone stops using one of our products today, we hope that they would be willing to try one of our other products at some point in the future.
Furthermore Google has initiated a Transparency Report where you are able to see the various requests regarding content removal, user data or traffic. It seems that 93% of government requests were fulfilled. And what about Internet Service Providers? Is your data safe with them? Is every request by the government a valid one?
A excerpt from twit.tv Tech325 about privacy, government requests, Google regularly receives requests from government agencies and courts around the world to remove content from our services and hand over user data. Our Government Requests tool discloses the number of requests we receive from each government in six-month reporting periods with certain limitations.
This front seems like a good initiative and presumably is intended in that manner, but my advise is to peruse through the whole transcript of the hearing (I left some unimportant parts out) to get the real gist of it, you can find part one of the hearing where Eric Schmidt (chairman of Google) is a witness on page two and on page three you can find the second panel they had some very interesting questions and remarks. I don’t wanna tell you what’s right or wrong about Google, make up your own mind, but those who’re informed will foresee what might be coming.
Links
Google Signs Deal to Buy Manhattan Office Building
Robert Heron Bork (born March 1, 1927) is an American legal scholar who has advocated the judicial philosophy of originalism.
In 2010 Google acquired ITA, a flight information software company
The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.
Google buys Zagat in push for local market
Google to Buy Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion to Gain Wireless Patents
Microsoft Has Lost $5.5Billion On Bing Till Date; $9B On Internet Services
