Texas inquires on our approach to competition

Posted by by Don Harrison, Deputy General Counsel

We've always worked hard to ensure that our success is earned the right way -- by building great products, not locking in our users or advertisers. That said, we recognize that as Google grows, we’re going to face more questions about how our business works.

As Search Engine Land first reported, we've recently been approached by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office, which is conducting an antitrust review of Google. We look forward to answering their questions because we’re confident that Google operates in the best interests of our users.

Occasionally, we’re asked about the “fairness” of our search engine -- why do some websites get higher rankings than others? The important thing to remember is that we built Google to provide the most useful, relevant search results and ads for users. In other words, our focus is on users, not websites. Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking.

The Texas Attorney General’s office asked for information about a number of companies whose cases have been well publicized. Here is some background on them:

• Foundem -- the British price comparison site that is backed by ICOMP, an organization funded largely by Microsoft. They claim that Google’s algorithms demote their site because they are a direct competitor to our search engine. The reality is that we don’t discriminate against competitors. Indeed, companies like Amazon, Shopping.com and Expedia typically rank very high in our results because of the quality of the service they offer users. Various experts have taken a closer look at the quality of Foundem’s website, and New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann concluded, “I want Google to be able to rank them poorly.”

• SourceTool/TradeComet - SourceTool is a website run by parent company TradeComet, whose private antitrust lawsuit against Google was dismissed by a federal judge earlier this year. The media have noted that TradeComet is represented by longtime Microsoft antitrust attorneys, and independent search experts have called SourceTool a “click arbitrage” site with little original content.

• myTriggers - Another site represented by Microsoft’s antitrust attorneys, myTriggers alleges that they suffered a drop in traffic because Google reduced their ad quality ratings. But recent filings have revealed that the company’s own servers overheated, explaining their reduced traffic.

We work hard to explain our approach to search and how our ranking works, and we also listen carefully to people’s concerns. We’re looking forward to working cooperatively with the Texas Attorney General’s office, and we strongly believe our business practices reflect our commitment to build great products for the benefit of users everywhere.

Trimming our privacy policies

Posted by Mike Yang, Associate General Counsel
(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Long, complicated and lawyerly—that's what most people think about privacy policies, and for good reason. Even taking into account that they’re legal documents, most privacy policies are still too hard to understand.

So we’re simplifying and updating Google’s privacy policies. To be clear, we aren’t changing any of our privacy practices; we want to make our policies more transparent and understandable. As a first step, we’re making two types of improvements:

1. Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy. Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a lot of repetition, we are deleting 12 of these product-specific policies. These changes are also in line with the way information is used between certain products—for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well.
2. We’re also simplifying our main Google Privacy Policy to make it more user-friendly by cutting down the parts that are redundant and rewriting the more legalistic bits so people can understand them more easily. For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies.

In addition, we’re adding:

• More content to some of our product Help Centers so people will be able to find information about protecting their privacy more easily; and
• A new privacy tools page to the Google Privacy Center. This will mean that our most popular privacy tools are now all in one place.

These privacy policy updates will take effect in a month, on October 3. You can see the new main Google Privacy Policy here, and if you have questions this FAQ should be helpful.

Our updated privacy policies still might not be your top choice for beach reading (I am, after all, still a lawyer), but hopefully you’ll find the improvements to be a step in the right direction.

Content ID explained at TED

Posted by Mistique Cano, Manager, Public Policy Communications

YouTube’s Margaret Gould Stewart recently gave a TED talk about how YouTube’s Content ID system cross-references over 24 hours of uploaded content a minute with our rights holder database to give copyright owners choices. In the video, she shows how the Content ID technology works and explains, “The scale and speed of the system is breathtaking… We’re talking about over a hundred of years of video a day. It would be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and everyday without so much as coffee break.” Check it out.

An update on our ITA Software acquisition

Posted by Andrew Silverman, Senior Product Manager

Last month we announced our plans to acquire ITA Software. Today, after meeting with many companies in the industry, we're even more excited about building new tools that will make it easier for consumers to search for flights, compare flight options, and get you quickly to a site where you can buy a ticket.

We’ve been encouraged by the travel industry support we’ve seen for this acquisition -- from airlines to online travel agencies. Even longtime travel guru Arthur Frommer said that "the existence of so many competing airfare search engines convinces me that the field will remain competitive even after Google enters it.”

While we think this acquisition will benefit travelers as well as those seeking their business, we know that closer scrutiny has been one consequence of Google's success, and we said that we wouldn’t be surprised if there were a regulatory review before the deal closes. This week we received what's called a "second request," which means that the U.S. Department of Justice is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal.

While this means we won't be closing the deal right away, we're confident that the DOJ will conclude that online travel will remain competitive after this acquisition closes. In fact, over the past few weeks online travel companies have noted that they have alternatives to ITA’s product: Kayak's CEO called Expedia’s Best Fare Search alternative "awesome"; Orbitz said that "Worldspan's e-Pricing search technology is a good solution that Travelport is devoting resources to develop. So we have alternatives available to us”; and Continental Airlines noted that "there are alternatives to the [ITA] shopping solution in the marketplace, both internally and externally.”

While we of course hope to continue working with ITA’s current customers, these comments demonstrate that competition will remain alive and well. We’ll be working cooperatively with the Department of Justice as they continue their review.