The Incredible Stupidity Of Investigating Google For Acting Like A Search Engine
I did a search at Google today for “cars” and was shocked. Rather than list links allowing me to search for “cars” on Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Voila, Naver and Yandex, Google instead favored its own search results.
Context & Ripple Effects
Search Engine Land's argument is aimed at a confirmed regulatory probe into whether Google unfairly favors its own properties in results — illustrated by a 'cars' query returning Google's own vertical instead of links to rival engines like Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Voila, Naver and Yandex. It lands amid a stretch of aggressive Google expansion: the long-delayed Google Editions e-book store nearing launch, AppNexus suspended from the real-time ad exchange, Chrome Web Store previews in Europe, and an unconfirmed report of a $2.5 billion Groupon purchase that neither company has verified.
The column's framing — that penalizing a search engine for ranking itself is absurd — pushes back against a line of criticism that has built since Google's years of opaque search-quality tweaks drew scrutiny over how little users know about why results rank as they do. The stakes are whether ranking choices count as editorial freedom or as anti-competitive self-preferencing.
First-order effects
- Google now has to defend its ranking of its own services before investigators, turning product-design decisions — like what a query for 'cars' returns — into potential evidence in an antitrust case.
- Rival engines named in the test (Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Voila, Naver, Yandex) gain a concrete grievance narrative they can take to regulators and press.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and vertical sites displaced by Google's own results have an incentive to organize complaints, shifting pressure from consumer-choice arguments to supplier-harm arguments that antitrust enforcers act on.
- If self-preferencing becomes punishable, every Google surface that bundles its own property — from e-book retailing via Editions to the ad exchange where it just cut off AppNexus — inherits the same legal exposure.
Third-order effects
- A precedent here would establish 'search neutrality' as a standing regulatory category, forcing platforms everywhere to either justify self-ranking or separate navigation from commerce.
- Conversely, if the investigation collapses under the argument this column makes, regulators may conclude that intervening in ranking algorithms is impractical, leaving gatekeeper power unchecked until a different enforcement tool emerges.
The trend: Regulators are moving from treating search ranking as an untouchable black box toward interrogating how large platforms rank their own services — a question that will follow Google across each new market it enters.