Google Chairman Eric Schmidt predictably faced a firing line of hostile questions about the way the company ranks search results Wednesday in a highly-anticipated Senate hearing that at times became surreal because of the cross-talk between Schmidt and his interlocutors.
Wednesday’s hearing is the culmination of longstanding antitrust complaints lodged against Google by competitors both big and small who complain that Google has changed its business model to direct its firehose of search traffic to its own properties rather than to competitors’ sites. Among the most persistent critics of Google have been comparison shopping sites as well as restaurant review sites such as Yelp. Yelp’s co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman was scheduled to testify in front of the committee Wednesday as well.
The Senate’s antitrust subcommittee Chairman Herb Kohl (D-WI) set the tone of the hearing when he opened with a question to Schmidt about Google Vice President Marissa Mayer’s statement at a 2007 conference that Google ranks its links to its own products like Google Finance first, saying that it’s “only fair.”
That was the beginning of an intense back-and-forth between Schmidt and Kohl and in particular ranking member Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT,) who spent his time pounding Schmidt about the way Google ranks product search results and comparison shopping engines.
Schmidt continually tried convince the senators that the comparisons that they were trying to make — between product searches and product comparison sites, couldn’t be compared.
In the case of Google Finance, he said, Google’s goal is to provide consumers with information immediately on what it assumes the searcher is looking for, which is a stock quote, rather than making them click through to several different sites to find the information.
Lee noted a study that showed that shopping-related searches resulted in comparison shopping vertical search sites NextTag, Pricegrabber and Shopper showing up with several different kinds of rankings, but with Google’s own shopping comparison site showing up consistently at third place.
“It seems to me, for whatever it’s worth, when I see this, when I see you magically coming up third every time, that seems to me, I don’t know if you call this a separate algorithm, or whether you’ve reverse engineered one algorithm, but either way, you’ve cooked it so that you’re always third!” Lee said to Schmidt after he repeatedly tried to explain how Google’s search engineers have set up search for products.
“Google product search is about getting to a product, so we tend to look for a product versus a product comparison in this case, which is why the product is ranked higher than the product comparison sites,” he said.
Responding to Lee, Schmidt said: “Senator, I can assure you we have not cooked anything.”
