Buried FTC report found Google altered search results

The Wall Street Journal said it was mistakenly sent a 2012 Federal Trade Commission report that concluded that Google was indeed – as European investigators found – altering search results.

The Journal said that it had filed a Freedom of Information Act request and received the 160 page report which concluded that Google’s “conduct has resulted-and will result-in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets.”

As a Journal article said yesterday, “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.”

The reason was simple revenue. “The FTC staff,” said the Journal, “found that Google promoted its own services in part because it feared losing searches, and advertising revenue, to rivals such as Yelp and TripAdvisor.”

Google stoutly defended its record before Congress in 2011, and Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in response to the Journal’s revelations that there was no manipulation of data, and that the FTC decided not to charge Google.

This was despite Google having, to quote the FTC report, “... adopted a strategy of demoting or refusing to display, links to certain vertical websites in highly commercial categories.”

The Journal didn’t say why a report that found such misconduct buried its findings and neglected to act against Google. But “European  antitrust authorities in 2013 said Google had a different, ‘specialized’ search algorithm for ranking its own content.”

Nevertheless, the FTC said, “…we do not recommend that the Commission issue a complaint against Google for this conduct.”

It remains to be seen whether any governmental body will pick up the trail revealed by the FTC report.

How Google Skewed Search Results (The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 19, 2015)