The investigation is being led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said last month that the probe would first focus on the company's advertising business, which continues to dominate the online advertising sector.
Google's decades-long dominance in the search market may not be quite as organic as the company has alluded, according to The Wall Street Journal, which published a lengthy report today delving into the way Google's black-box search process actually works.
According to the contractor, Google soon after put out a message to the contracting firm that the Lifeline should be marked as the top result for all searches relating to suicide so that the company algorithms would adjust to consider it the top result.
At least one employee defended the result, writing that Google should let the algorithms decide what shows up, according to one person familiar with the matter. Instead, the people said, Google made a change so that the first result is a site called howdovaccinescauseautism.comwhich states on its home page in large black letters, They fing dont.
The algorithms governing Google's auto-complete and suggestion functions are also heavily subject to review, the sources said.
The company has since maintained an internal blacklist of terms that are not allowed to appear in autocomplete, organic search, or Google News, the sources told the WSJ, even though company leadership has said publicly, including to Congress, that the company does not use blacklists or whitelists to influence its results.
That kind of use of data, among others, could be considered harmful to competition, since the company is using data collected from competitors to keep users from going to those competitors.
Original article