Google has been lambasted times and again by different people for using search results to promote its own products. Whether or not this may be true, people tend to think that Google keeps meddling with search results and can tweak that whichever way it wants. Now, Google has decided to give out a very clear answer to these questions.
Recently, the CEO of comparison shopping site Nextag heaped a whole lot of accusations against Google when talking to the Wall Street Journal. He specifically criticized Google and said that once Google used to present relevant and popular results, now it simply shows sponsored results which may or may not be relevant.
Google responded to these accusations in a blog post, stating that sponsored results in Google search are clearly labeled as sponsored and the users know very well about this. The general results, on the other hand, are not affected by sponsored ads and present only relevant searches.
He further alleged that Google has used its hegemony over online search to punish its competitors and tweak its algorithms so that searches don’t promote these competitors. Google is of the view that they devise algorithms keeping users in their minds, not websites or competitors. Also, the company keeps making changes to its algorithms and these changes are published online.
The rest of the post more or less shows that Google has evolved, as have all other popular search engines on the web. And that with this evolution, a greater stress is being placed on presenting the users with the correct and relevant results.
Source: Google Public Policy Blog
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