Is Google’s monopoly affecting search results? The tech titan faces a challenge

The founders of Internet search and digital advertising giant Google wrote in a 1998 article that the goals of Internet advertising “do not always correspond” to useful Internet search results.

Now, after it was discovered that Google has an illegal monopoly on search, critics are suggesting that the company that has become synonymous with internet search, as Sergey Brin and Larry Page feared, has “moved out of touch with consumer needs.”

Google, as noted tech industry critic Ed Zitron said in an interview, “has gotten greedy.”

Today, people who type a search term into Google often find relevant information, but they also get a page of ads, often followed by links to websites with content designed to convert views and clicks into cash. Recently, search results have been highlighting e-commerce sites like Amazon and crowd-sourced sites like Reddit and Google’s YouTube, a new study shows.

Google did not respond to questions about its search product and the federal court’s monopoly finding. In a blog post this year, the company said it has used “advanced spam-fighting systems for decades” and in 2022 it began adjusting its site ranking systems to “reduce unhelpful, unoriginal content and keep it at a very low level,” while “algorithmic improvements” will help “extract the most useful information.”

Last month’s landmark monopoly finding by Judge Amit P. Mehta in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google has shed light on the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s wildly popular search engine. Mehta, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said Google’s conclusion in a 2020 study that it would not lose search revenue if it lowered search quality was evidence of illegal monopoly power.

On September 6, Mehta begins the next phase of the Justice Department’s case against Google—which it says controls at least 90% of the U.S. internet search market—to strip it of its search monopoly. The judge focused his 277-page ruling on the company’s payments to companies like Apple and Samsung to make Google its default search engine, saying that “the majority of devices in the United States come pre-loaded with Google alone.”

Critics say the lack of competition allows the company to cut corners while money — $238 billion in ad revenue last year — flows in.

Zitron, CEO of EZPR, a public relations firm in San Francisco, and host of the iHeart podcast “Better Offline,” said internal Google emails revealed in legal proceedings suggest that changes in senior management have led to less user-friendly changes to search results.

Five years ago, Google’s top executives declared a “code yellow” because of declining search query growth and the high advertising revenue they were generating, according to an email. While Google’s accountants were looking for solutions, search executives fretted over the conflict identified by founders Brin and Page. Search chief Ben Gomes complained that his division was “too close to the money” and “too invested in advertising for the good of the product and the company.”

A little over a year later, Google combined search and advertising into one unit under Prabhakar Raghavan, its advertising chief. Gomes, after two decades of building search, was relegated to education initiatives.

Google has begun prioritizing the volume of searches over the quality of results “so it can show you as many ads as possible,” Zitron says.

The company’s search results page has become cluttered in recent years with ads labeled “sponsored,” which may not help the user but are lucrative for Google. Spammers and marketers use keyword and content tricks to push some sites higher in the results, forcing Google to play catch-up while users pay in wasted time and frustration.

“I’ve never seen as many people complaining or pointing out problems with Google results as I have in the past year,” says Lily Ray, vice president of marketing agency Amsive, which tracks Google search trends. “I’m seeing a ton of spam in Google search results. It’s never been more apparent to me.”

Mehta said there was “some evidence” that Google’s spending on search had fallen, and in the rare cases where competition had emerged, the company had quickly invested in improvements. But the judge said innovation could increase its already dominant market share, describing Google as the “premier search engine” in technology.

But Christopher Hockett, an associate professor at UC Berkeley Law School, said that “the background to all of this is that if you had more competition, you would have higher quality.”

Research from Illinois-based Amsive shows that Google updates in recent years have made some types of sites less visible, including those that use stock images or photos pulled from social media, or feature AI-generated content, or lack expertise, or feature intrusive ads or lots of cash-for-click links. But in the case of product searches, many highly rated comparison sites make money when a user clicks through to a brand’s site to make a purchase, or, as Ray notes, are “pay-to-play” operations that charge brands a fee to be listed on their site.

Google’s changes this year are causing product review sites to rank lower, while e-commerce stores, especially Amazon, appear higher, often alongside YouTube, Amsive said. The New York Times’ popular Wirecutter product review site, which relies on extensive testing, now often falls below forum sites Reddit and Quora in the top product results, Ray said.

Reddit’s visibility has increased by more than 1,000% this year compared to 2023, according to Amsive data. In July 2023, a Google search for “how to potty train a boy” produced only pregnancy and medical sites in the top 10 results — plus YouTube — with the Mayo Clinic in first place. In July of this year, a five-year-old Reddit post jumped from 50th to No. 2, above “authoritative sites like the Mayo Clinic,” Amsive said.

Google may have developed the technology to find the most helpful answers to questions, but it apparently decided to “just put Reddit out there,” Zitron said.

Thousands of layoffs at Google in recent years have destroyed institutional knowledge about search, Zitron said, and “they could have laid off so many people that this thing no longer works.”

Google’s race to join the generative AI craze that began with the release of ChatGPT in 2022 “may explain why some things are being missed” in search, Ray said. She added: “They’re a monopoly. They’re the default search engine. Their stock is going up and up. What incentive do they have to fix that?”

Barry Schwartz, CEO of New York software firm RustyBrick and editor of the Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable blogs, said Google is constantly innovating and experimenting with search. “I probably see five to 10 new things a day in terms of testing,” Schwartz said. “Probably one of the most important things they focus on is making sure that the content in search results is useful.”

Still, Schwartz said, “If Google found itself under fire from competitors and needed to do more, I think it would.”

2024 MediaNews Group, Inc. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.