Google is not unbiased search engine: liars who favor their own services

Google was accused of misusing its search monopoly to unfairly favor its own services over its rivals, according to the antitrust complaint filed by the UK-based search company Foundem. While Google refuted the claims saying the company's search engine always delivers "the best end-user outcome”, Harvard professor and Google watcher Ben Edelman believes otherwise. Edelman alleges he has found a "smoking gun" that indicates Google's search engine does in fact favor the company's own services.

According to Edelman there are evidences that prove Google may "hard-code" its own links to appear at the top of certain algorithmic search result pages, including links for Google Finance, Google Health, and other Mountain View-operated web services. It means, that certain search results appear irrespective of the Google’s search algorithms which contradicts to the much tooted company’s policy of unbiased and completely automated search engine.

"Google's use of hard-coding and other search bias gives Google an important advantage in any sector that requires or benefits from substantial algorithmic search traffic," Edelman writes in a blog post unveiled on Monday morning. "By directing users to Google services, Google can make its offerings take off in a broad class of services — be it health, finance, maps, video, travel, or otherwise.

When asked to comment a spokesperson for Google said: "We built Google for users, not websites, and while think it’s important to be transparent with websites about how we rank sites, ultimately our goal is to give users the most useful answer possible. Sometimes the most useful answer is a list of links, but other times it's a stock quote, a list of movie times, or quick answer to a question. That's what users want." And as it is usually done by the person who wants to shift the focus from his misdeeds to the reputation of another man who denounces him, Google spokesman noted that Ben Edelman has been a paid consultant for Microsoft.

Meantime, Edelman supports his arguments with specific facts. He suggests to type "CSCO" — Cisco's stock ticker symbol – in Google’s search bar. Google returns a Google Finance page as the top result — though it's not labeled as such — and the next two most prominent links (a stock price chart and a link that does say "Google Finance") point to the same Google Finance page. This despite the fact that according to comScore, Google Finance is not the web's most popular finance site.

The question, Edelman says, is whether or not Google algorithms select Google Finance for these top spots. "How do Google's less popular services come to receive such valuable placements? Does favorable pagerank (or other favorable reputation) of google.com spill over onto other Google services to guarantee top position under standard ranking algorithms? Or have Google staff manually adjusted ('hard-coded') search results to give favored treatment to other Google services?" he asks.

Yes, Edelman argues they're hard-coded. To buttress this claim, he performs the same "CSCO" search, but with a comma at the end. With the typical algorithmic search, adding a comma doesn't affect the results (Edelman offers a "comma search tool" to show this). But if you search on "CSCO," — rather than "CSCO" — those Google Finance links vanish:

"What system design could explain that disappearance?" Edelman says. "My best assessment: If Google staff manually specified that a given result should appear at the top of results when users search for a specific search term, they might well forget to include search term variants with appended commas. Then a user searching for an unexpected variant, including by adding a comma, can see 'true' Google algorithmic search, unaffected by the manual overrides."