Google is feeling defensive right now about its role in search.
What you need to know
- Google responds to the allegations that it has a monopoly on search.
- The company says that redesigning Google Search could actually harm consumers.
- Antitrust allegations against Google could last for the next few years with a trial date set in 2023.
Amid the bombardment of antitrust allegations against Google, the company has issued a couple of statements defending its practices. The first came through a blog post about privacy on the web and how businesses can grow by navigating the use of cookies and more responsible use of online data.
We strongly believe that advertising and privacy can coexist. Helping businesses adapt to a privacy-safe web isn’t just good business practice—if done right, and done collaboratively, it can be an engine for economic recovery and growth.
It’s a curious stance for Google to take, considering what it’s being accused of. The allegations against Google all claim that the company has a monopoly on search and that it has too tight a control over the ads presented in its search results. Our Google antitrust faq page can help explain more about these allegations.
Google’s blog post even manages to point out how it competes with a number of different companies to provide “ad tech” to different entities on the web, stating that “all this competition drives us to innovate and improve our tools.” The remainder of the blog post goes on to explain cookies and data privacy, but Google’s following blog post is a little more interesting.
Google is perhaps a little more defensive in the second blog post, titled “Redesigning Search would harm American consumers and businesses”. It’s straightforward in getting Google’s point across, explaining how it constantly works to improve search and plainly states that “if you don’t like the results we’re giving you, you have numerous alternatives—including Amazon, Expedia, Tripadvisor, and many others just a click away.”
Google goes on to explain how the company is constantly aiming to improve search for the benefit of the consumers, by including more relevant information on search results fom different sources such as businesses:
The company even takes a moment to compare their search results to Microsoft Bing, highlighting how its rival has gone exactly the same route in evolving its search engine to make more information readily available to consumers. Google claims that its advanced search tools, found on even the best cheap Android phones, directly connect as many as 4 billion consumers with business per month and that the lawsuits calling for the company to redesign its search would harm not only consumers but businesses as well. “It suggests we shouldn’t have worked to make Search better and that we should, in fact, be less useful to you.”
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