In the ongoing EU investigation Google has offered to explain how they ranks their search results.
The offer to explain the search rankings comes a day after the EU Commission announced that it has started an investigation to see if Google violates European competition laws. In a blog post yesterday Google’s Amit Singhal responds to an article in The New York Times, which suggests that lawmakers should regulate how search results are ranked on the Internet’s search engines. According to Amit Singhal this is a very complex task and may be difficult for authorities to do in an effective manner.
Our algorithms use hundreds of different signals to pick the top results for any given query. Signals are indicators of relevance, and they include items as simple as the words on a webpage or more complex calculations such as the authoritativeness of other sites linking to any given page.
According to Amit Singhal, Google never never does any manual adjustments to promote their own services. As an example he says that a search for “search engines” do not place Google at the top of the results.
The reason for the EU Commissions investigation is that three companies have complained to the EU claiming that Google has favored their own services on some searches. One of the companies behind the complaint is owned by Microsoft.
Source: ComputerSweden
