Today, Google often considers that right place to be Google, an investigation by The Markup has found.
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A trending search inour datafor myocardial infarction shows how Google has piled up its products at the top.
It returned:
All of these appeared before search results by WebMD, Harvard University, and Medscape.
A number of websites said it killed their revenuesand their companies.
Travel research firm Skiftwrotein November that the entire online travel industry is suffering.
Levin called The Markupsmethodologyflawed and misleading.
However, Google has not publicly released a random sample of searches for research.
At that time, that generally meant to direct people from search results to websites.
As search technologies have developed, thats not always the best way to assist people.
She did not answer questions about whether those changes present the search engine with a conflict of interest.
Nearly nine in 10 U.S. web searches are performed on Google.
They garnered almosttwice as manyU.S.
The Federal Trade Commission isexaminingpast acquisitions by tech companies, including Google, for harm to competition.
Politicoreportedthat the Department of Justice will file an antitrust lawsuit against the company soon.
Google helped build the free internet.
The site provides free translations and dictionary entries, many written by linguists and translators, he said.
It is ad-supported and needs web traffic to survive.
For years, he said, it grew as Google grew.
If were only getting 2 percent of the click-through, theres no business to run here.
He said Googles actions have affected our ability to invest in the future.
Levin did not respond to questions about Google Translate or its effect on SpanishDict.
SpanishDict.com showed up three times in our sample, each time below either Google Translate or Googles dictionary.
AMP pages are hosted by Google but created and monetized by publishers.
AMP has been controversial, with somepublishersanddeveloperssaying it gives Google too much control over the web.
Levin objected to that decision, saying AMP results should be non-Google.
Those are outbound links to publishers and other web creators.
To suggest otherwise is not factual, she said.
The news stories in those carousels were often delivered in AMP in our data.
They also include weather, sports statistics, and dictionary definitions.
Levin said Google does not give preference to YouTube, its subsidiary.
Recent tests by The Wall Street Journalfoundthat it did.
The quantity of Google results in some searches in our sample was quite large.
A search for the Shania TwainsongMan!
Non-Google results took up only 22 percent of the page.
Genius.com and Biography.coms results were delivered in AMP.
A search for nonstop flight also returned Google Flights in the top spot, above competitors.
And travel sites arent just Googles competitors; theyre also its customers.
When they compete against their advertisers …
In the industry, Google Flights is not seen as the best product.
Itdid not crack the top 10of Frommers 2020 ranking of airfare search engines, for instance.
The same search on Orbitz turned up a flight for $772, while ITA Matrix offered $766.69.
The same search on ITA Matrix showed the same flight at a different time for $242.40.
But a Google Flights search showed nothing: Aw snap, no results.
Levin would not directly address that issue with The Markup.
Once up-and-coming travel website Hipmunk blames its death in part on Google Searchs high ranking of Googles travel products.
A Silicon Valley favorite, Hipmunk was among the first to compare prices for Airbnb alongside hotels.
It invented an agony ranking to help customers decide if that cheap flight was really worth it.
This strategy led to booming organic traffic from Google, said its CEO at the time, Adam Goldstein.
One quarter, that traffic started to really fall from what we were planning.
And then the next quarter it fell short by even more, Goldstein said.
As Google Flights grew, airlines realized they didnt need referrals from smaller players like Hipmunk, Goldstein said.
The department launched an inquiry but has not taken any action.
Concur shut Hipmunk down in January.
Levin, the Google spokesperson, declined to address Goldsteins complaints.
Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web, he said.
We feel thats a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results.
Their search engine doesnt necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portals results.
Sheresponded, It seems only fair, right?
DuckDuckGo has 1.5 percent, and Bing has 7 percent, according toStatcounter.
Fundamentally, consumers do want instant answers, said Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo.
That is a tension with the open web and the sites that produce that information.
Microsoft declined to comment.
Wikipedia said it has not seen a drop in donations as a result.
Its become really difficult to understand where information comes from.
What is the provenance of what were learning?
His traffic crumbled, and Warner said he had to lay off half of his 12-person staff.
Google filed a demand for a jury trial.
Levin declined to comment on the companys claims or its lawsuit.
Some websites make a run at get into featured snippets because its high up on the page.
Levin said it can drive meaningful traffic to their sites but declined to provide specifics.
Some sites take whatever traffic Google search provides and dont complain.
Cummings, of SpanishDict.com, said something similar.
Google delivers the traffic for the whole internet.
Unless your name is Facebook, you rely on Google, he said.
Its very risky to speak out at Google because you dont know what key in of retaliation youll face.
Frederic Lambert said his site was demoted in search listings when Google rebooted its shopping product in 2012.
It allowed consumers to set alerts if the price dropped.
When users clicked or bought something, sellers paid him a commission.
Starting in 2012, revenues decreased by half, until he shut it down in 2018.
They did kill us, he said.
But not by making the best product.
Google said itdisagreeswith the commissions decision, which it hasappealed.
And some argue that the industry will never fully recover.
This article wasoriginally published on The Markupby Adrianne Jeffries and Leon Yin and was republished under theCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeslicense.
