Google recently made a radical revamp of its main search page, adding a new category of “sponsored” e-commerce results when consumers search for a particular product — and Microsoft is highlighting the change in a new ad campaign arguing users are getting “Scroogled.”
In the past, Google kept a firm distinction between search results that the company claimed were unbiased by payments to Google and ad results that were clearly marked as such. Now, Google has introduced a new third category of e-commerce results that muddle the results for consumers considerably:
But anyone who clicks on a tab at the top for shopping-specific results will see only listings for paying merchants. That means results from sites, including Web retailing giant Amazon.com Inc., aren’t displayed unless they pay. Amazon so far has only occasionally paid to have some of its wares listed in Google’s shopping section…
Since mid-October, Google’s shopping section has included only listings from merchants who paid to be included in the results. In some cases, the order of the shopping results has been dictated by how much money Google received for the listing. The change coincides with what is expected to be the most lucrative holiday shopping season on the Web yet…
The financially driven system for determining the results in a major part of Google’s search engine breaks new ground for a company whose idealistic founders, Page and Sergey Brin, once railed against the perils of allowing money to influence which Web links to show.
With the company facing antitrust investigations in both Europe and the U.S. over how Google uses its dominant position to manipulate search results, it’s a sign of pretty hefty arrogance by the company to introduce this new manipulation just as it enters negotiations with antitrust authorities. Given that the result of this new system is likely to be consumers being steered towards more expensive sites in many cases, those antitrust authorities don’t have to look far for a pretty clear example of consumer harm stemming from Google’s disproportionate dominance of online search.