Advocacy Group Asks DOJ To Probe Google Search Results

Consumer Watchdog today called on the Justice Department to guarantee that its ongoing antitrust probe of Google's business practices include an investigation into if the company is manipulating its search results to favor its own products.

The nonprofit advocacy group said it sent a letter to Christine Varney, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Division, after news that the European Commission had received three complaints against Google alleging the company manipulated search engine results in an anticompetitive way.

Also this week U.K. based price comparison site Foundem filed papers with the Federal Communications Commission with examples of how Google products were allegedly favored in its search results.

"We know and appreciate that your department is conducting an ongoing antitrust investigation of various business practices by Google, some of that related to the proposed Google Books settlement," wrote John M. Simpson, consumer advocate.

"Today I write to call upon you to ensure that included in that probe is consideration of how Google may use its search algorithms to manipulate Internet search results to favor its own products."

With around 70 percent of the search market in the U.S., Consumer Watchdog says Google is effectively the Internet's gatekeeper for most consumers. The group says whether a website is ever visited can depend entirely on where it lands in Google search results.

"As part of your continued antitrust investigation we call on you to shine a light on Google's black box, and require it to explain what's behind search results," Simpson wrote.

"If, as it appears, Google is tweaking results to further its narrow agenda, this anticompetitive behavior must be stopped."
 

Google Integrates Panoramio, Picasa

Google Earth, Google Maps, and regular Google search results may sport some more geographically relevant photos in the future.  Today, Google announced that it's linked Panoramio and Picasa in order to make it easier for people to share pictures.

Panoramio is the geolocation-centric photo-sharing site that Google acquired in 2007.  Picasa is the more traditional photo-sharing site Google's owned since 2004.  Bringing them together makes sense, even if it's not the timeliest move Google's ever made.

As for some specifics, Roger Trias i Sanz, a software engineer at Panoramio, wrote in a post on the LatLong Blog, "[W]e are happy to announce that you can upload your pictures right from Picasa Web Albums into Panoramio.  By uploading your best photos of places into Panoramio you can share them with the Panoramio community and the world . . ."

Or you can not share them, of course.  Google's apparently learned some lessons about unauthorized automation since the debut of Buzz, as the post made clear that photos must be both geotagged and in a public album to be transferred from Picasa to Panoramio.  Plus, users will have to be logged into a Panoramio account to start an upload.

All in all, this development has the potential to improve several of Google's products without upsetting anybody.

Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

Google has begun including geographical region information on some search results. The information is used when supplied by webmasters, and appears in the green address line on the results that include it.

"Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan," explains Google software engineer Piyush Prahladka. "However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it's not as easy to figure out the location."

"With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you're looking for," says Prahladka. "In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries."

If you wish to provide Google with the information required for getting your site's region to show up in search results, you will need to log in to Webmaster Tools and go to Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. There you will be able to associate a country/region with your site.

Webmasters have been able to utilize the feature that lets them associate their sites with regions for quite some time, but that information hasn't appeared in search results in the past.

Right now, Google is only showing region tags in results for certain domains like .com and .net. They don't show them at all for sites that have location-specific ccTLDs (.br, .co.uk, etc.). The feature is designed to help users figure out where a site is based if that is not already clear.

It is also worth noting that Google will only show the region tags when the region associated with the site is different than the region the searcher's query originates from. So if I search from here in the US, I will not see results that say "US", but I might see results that say "Canada".

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Google May Change Your Page Titles

In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google's Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this.

Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is 'Untitled' or if there is no title. If that's the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."

"We reserve the right to try to figure out what's a better title, what's a more descriptive title or snippet to show the users," he continues.

According to Cutts, if you have a title that's really long, they may still use that in their scoring, but in the snippet, they might try to find a "better title." This is presumably based on what the user is looking for.

As Cutts has said in the past, sometimes Google will use snippets right from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Sometimes, they'll simply use snippets from the page or the meta description tag. "We do a bunch of different things to find the best description that we can," he says.

"If you have a bad title or a title that we don't think helps users as much, we can try to find a better title, and one we think will be an informative result so that users will know whether that's a good result for them to click on," he says.

Have you noticed Google changing your titles? Did they find better ones? Discuss here.

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