SEARCH CLINIC

Google has been accused of manipulating its rivals’ myTriggers, SourceTool/TradeComet and Foundem search rankings.
Regulators in Texas have launched the first broad anti-trust review of Google’s search and advertising practices in the US.

While federal regulators in Washington have investigated the impact on competition of Google’s business deals in the past, Greg Abbott, Texas attorney general, is the first regulator to look more broadly at its core search business, amid growing concerns about the power the online business wields.

In the Texas case, Google said in a blog post on Friday that it had been asked for information about three different firms that have raised complaints against it.

The three – myTriggers and SourceTool/TradeComet in the US, and Foundem in the UK – have accused Google of reducing their traffic by pushing them down its search rankings.

“The important thing to remember is that we built Google to provide the most useful, relevant search results and ads for users. In other words, our focus is on users, not websites. Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower-quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking.”

He added that companies such as Amazon, Shopping.com and Expedia typically rank high in Google’s search results “because of the quality of the service they offer users”.

The company has faced a flurry of legal challenges and lost a copyright case in Germany against its YouTube business.

It also paid $8.5m to settle a class action lawsuit in the US over alleged privacy violations at its Buzz social networking service. It also faces a lawsuit from software company Oracle, which accuses Google of patent infringement with the Android mobile operating system and officials in Brussels have also raised the prospect of a possible inquiry into anti-competitive behaviour by Google.

Google has repeatedly shown a “disappointing disregard” for safeguarding private information, the privacy officials from 10 major countries have warned.

Britain’s Information Commissioner Chris Graham and equivalent officials from Canada, France, Germany and Italy were among the signatories to a letter to the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, which condemned the way the company has delivered both its Streetview mapping service and its Buzz product, which was conceived as a rival to social network Facebook.

The letter, organised by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, calls on Google to lay out how it will meet concerns about its use of public data in the future, and says that it has “violated the fundamental principle that individuals should be able to control the use of their personal information”.

The search giant has already acted to address a number of the points now raised in the letter, but said that it had no further statements to make on its privacy policies.

The launch of the Buzz network in February sparked an international wave of protests because it took information about email users’ most common correspondents and automatically built each individual a network of followers.

This meant that links which people wished to keep private could immediately become public- without any warning or opt out opportunity.

Google Streetview, which provides an eye-level picture of almost every street in dozens of cities around the world, continues to cause “concern about the adequacy of the information [Google] provides before the images are captured”, the commissioners said.

The product has also been launched some countries “without due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms”, they added.

In a statement Google said that it had quickly rectified the problems that caused Buzz users concern. “We have discussed all these issues publicly many times before and have nothing to add to today’s letter,” the search company said. “Of course we do not get everything 100% right. We try very hard to be upfront about the data we collect, and how we use it, as well as to build meaningful controls into our products.“

The commissioners, however, said that they “remain extremely concerned about how a product with such significant privacy issues such as Buzz was launched in the first place”.

Dr Search has repeatedly warned about Google’s blatent disregard for your data security. Their response above does nothing to allay those fears. You have again been warned.

Google has finally recognised the flaws for it’s users’ privacy in it’s controversial social network Buzz.

The company has started asking all of its users to confirm or change their privacy settings, starting this week.

The firm was forced to make a series of changes to Buzz just days after launch, following a backlash from users worried about privacy intrusions.

Last month, US Congress members urged regulators to investigate the service and the private information it exposed.

The latest tweaks will also show every aspect of a user’s profile, from public settings to the websites users are connected to, and who they are following or being followed by.

“Shortly after launching Google Buzz, we quickly realised we didn’t get everything right and moved as fast as possible to improve the Buzz experience,” said Buzz product manager Todd Jackson in a blog post.

“Offering everyone who uses our products transparency and control is very important to us.”

Dr Search questions this pious statement. If Google were so concerned about privacy, why has it taken them six weeks to get their act together?

Google launched Buzz at the beginning of February and integrated it with the company’s e-mail product Gmail, which is said to have over 170m account holders.

Amid concern over how much personal information was being made public, Google made changes to Buzz to make it more clear how information was being shared as well as simplifying the process for blocking or following other users.

Those early fixes did not go far enough for some critics.

Last month, nearly a dozen members of Congress signed a letter asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate privacy concerns associated with Google’s social networking tool.

“We are writing to express our concern over claims that Google Buzz… breaches online consumer privacy and trust,” said the signatories, led by Representative John Barrow, a Georgia Democrat.

The service is also the subject of a class action lawsuit, and a leading privacy group has called for action from the FTC.

The Electronic Privacy Information Centre has alleged that Buzz is “deceptive” and breaks US consumer protection law.

Google’s controversial Buzz social web offering seems to have hit the buffers already as searches ignore it.

Although it was only released last month, it seems that the hype surrounding Google Buzz is all but dead.

Online ad network, Chitika reported that the web searches on the internet in general and on its network of 80,000 sites has definitely died for Google Buzz.

The Chitika blog post explains:

February 9th, 2010 – the day Buzz was launched – the search engines lit up with queries. The Chitika network saw about 1,500 searches that day for the term “Google Buzz,” approximately 15 times the number of searches for “Twitter.”

However, those searches dropped off quickly – on February 10th, there were 580 searches; on the 11th, 147. From the 12th on – only three days removed from Buzz’s much-hyped launch – searches for Google Buzz failed to break three digits, and in most cases elicited less than 10 searches per day.

The graph below shows Google Buzz’s fall in popularity.

And it’s not just Chitika that is seeing this trend. Google’s own research tool, Insights for Search tells a similar story.

According to the Google tool, by the 15th of February (only 5 days after the launch) searches for the service had dwindled to less than ten a day, and since February 26th there had only been about one search per day. While the chatter on Twitter about Google Buzz remains quite constant.

According to the data, in the past month, Google Buzz has been sending less traffic to TechCrunch than FriendFeed — the service which is essentially the same as Buzz, only better, and ever since the acquisition by Facebook has been a ghost town.

In the past month, FriendFeed is the #52 referrer of traffic to TechCrunch (in its heyday, it was occasionally in the top 20), Google Buzz, meanwhile, is at best #55.

Dr Search’s message to Google is simple- before you launch you next project protect your users’ privacy first- don’t frogmarch them into submission. Or risk another failure!

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