Mountain View, California — Google has recently overhauled its ‘Search Plus Your World’ (SPYW) yet again that seems to have rubbed some the wrong way, but this time rather than trimming of a couple of precious microseconds off its response time, it has manipulated its search results to favor its own products have brought the company under FTC scanner that includes Google+, the search engine titans new social media networking tool, an unidentified source familiar with the scrutiny informed Reuters on Friday.
By ‘personalization of results’, which involves more suitable information added to search engine results has turned out to be a regressive move for Google rather than a progressive one. Most people were anticipating the obvious social networking real-time results but critics were quick to bang ‘Search Plus Your World’ for what they see as privacy risks, not to mention preferential treatment for Google’s own properties over competitors.
The move comes on the heels of a announcement Tuesday from the Mountain View, California-based company that they were introducing new features designed at making search results more personalized for Google+ members, the news organization added.
Google+, which was introduced in June, offers many of the capabilities available on Twitter and on Facebook. As part of the changes, the new search engine capabilities, which the company has dubbed “Search Plus Your World,” was announced earlier this week.
The new features that can be switched on or off, allows Google to access information from Google+, as well as photos from the Picasa picture-sharing service, whenever a user is logged into their respective accounts. There are plans to incorporate additional Google services in the future, according to the Los Angeles Times.
US regulators are now investigating at whether Google really tampered with its search results to favor its own products have expanded the probe to include Google+, the search giant’s new social media networking tool, a source familiar with the probe said on Friday.
Moreover, the expansion of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) probe in the U.S. was also the topic of a January 13 article by Sara Forden and Brian Womack of Bloomberg, who cited “two people familiar with the situation” as the source of their information.
“The competition issues provoked by Google+ touches the heart of the FTC’s investigation into whether the company is giving preference to its own services in search results and whether that practice contravenes antitrust laws, said the people, who declined to be identified because the probe is not public,” Forden and Womack said.
A Google spokesman, however, said that the FTC had not asked about Google+ or indicated it was looking into the new social network as of this week.
“We believe that our improvements to search will benefit consumers,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich informed Forden and Womack in an email. “The laws are designed to help consumers benefit from innovation, not to help competitors.”
As has been discovered with recent search attempts, searching for celebrities points you to their Google+ Page, leaving out their corresponding Facebook and Twitter accounts. If you are signed in with your Google+ account your results will encompass everything from your Google+ photos and posts to other people’s Google+ profiles. This means, if you are not on Google+, you may not come up as a suggestion at all. Google has obviously rated Google+ pages higher for all kinds of queries, not caring if it produces a sensible result or not.
Image Credit: Search Engine Land…
Twitter has openly reacted to Google’s new feature, a Twitter spokesman saying, “As we have seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results. We are concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that is bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.” Google promptly responded to the comments, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service do not allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service”, as told to Search Engine Land.
On the other hand, last week, CNET’s Elinor Mills reported that the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) had asked FTC regulators to investigate Search Plus Your World to ascertain whether or not it did breached federal antitrust laws and/or poses a threat to consumer privacy.
“We asked the FTC, as part of its current investigation of possible antitrust violations, to assess whether the changes in Google Search also constitute an antitrust violation, and also whether the changes in Google Search violate the consent order Google recently signed with the Federal Trade Commission,” EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg told Mills during a conference call.
Furthermore, Twitter had also objected the change. Twitter’s general counsel, Alex Macgillivray, a former Google executive, said in a Tweet on Tuesday that Google’s changes “warped” Web searches and represented a “bad day for the internet.”