Google's Personalized Search Raising Privacy, Antitrust Concerns

Google's latest tinkering with its search results is causing concern among privacy advocates and online publishers while raising yet another set of antitrust concerns.

The search giant is now providing what it calls "personalized" search, basically meaning it not only searches for keywords that match your search query but also shuffles through comments and postings made by your friends on blogs and social media sites, most particularly Google+.

Aside from usability questions -- do you really care what your online "friends" are saying about trans fat's role in heart disease or do you want an expert opinion -- it raises concerns about whether comments made on Google+ will carry more weight than those made on other sites.

Trust and ...

Google is constantly making changes in its super-secret search algorithm, of course, and we're asked to trust that these changes are all being made to provide even better, more impartial and more timely search results to the end users.

Of course, there's no way to verify that since the process is so secret that it has spawned an entire industry of consultants and soothsayers who claim to know how search results can be slanted to benefit their clients.

Even if these modern versions of the phrenologists who claimed to measure mental acuity by analyzing head bumps are accurate, it raises a question that, as far as we know, Google has never answered: Should authors, reporters and publishers have to pay off probable charlatans in hopes of getting a few degrees of visibility for their efforts?  

There are those who will argue that Search Engine Optimization, as it is grandly known, amounts to little more than the protection rackets that used to plague small merchants and businesspeople back in the days when shakedown artists were real instead of virtual.

Big Brother

Some of this was OK when Google was still a fresh-faced start-up newly emerged from someone's garage in Palo Alto (or was it Mountain View?) but it causes a bit more concern now that Big G has grown into Big Brother.

"Google is an entrenched player trying to fight off its challenger Facebook by using its market dominance in a separate sector," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Los Angeles Times. "I think that should trouble people."

It certainly troubles Rotenberg, who says regulators should take a close look at what goes into Google's new personalized search results to see if there are legitimate privacy and antitrust concerns. Rotenberg says he may file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, asking it to investigate the situation.

He's not alone.  Twitter is publicly complaining that the personalized search results will be less relevant for many users and may harm Google's rivals in the social media and search fields.

Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray, who formerly worked at Google, said in a tweet yesterday that Google's search results were being "warped" and Twitter later issued a formal statement saying the changes would be "bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users."

Twitter said many Google users are looking for the latest breaking news.

"Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic," but Twitter said such results would be much harder to find if they must compete with Google+ results and other social media blather.

Ick

Many online news sites and even some traditional news publications are also concerned about the growing influence on search results of Google+, fearing that Google's search results will increasingly be determined by what Google+ members happen to be reading and commenting on rather than by more neutral, objective results.

“Ick. Remember when Google used to be a neutral player that crawled the Whole Dern Web? So sad to see that era pass,” said John Battelle, founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing. “It’s not Google’s fault, entirely, but it’s sad nonetheless.”

Venture capitalist MG Siegler, writing on his blog, summed it up in a one-world headline: “Antitrust+?”

“How on Earth is Google going to avoid antitrust inquiries with their new Search+ features announced today?,” he asked. “If Facebook, Twitter, etc., have any decent presence in DC, the ball began rolling a few hours ago. This is the type of case that Senators die for. Google wrapped it in a bow and placed it in one of their laps.”