Improving quality isn’t anti-competitive

Google has always worked to improve its services, creating new ways to provide better answers and show more useful ads. We’ve taken seriously the concerns in the European Commission’s Statement of Objections (SO) that our innovations are anti-competitive. The response we filed today shows why we believe those allegations are incorrect, and why we believe that Google increases choice for European consumers and offers valuable opportunities for businesses of all sizes.

The SO says that Google’s displays of paid ads from merchants (and, previously, of specialized groups of organic search results) “diverted” traffic away from shopping services. But the SO doesn't back up that claim, doesn't counter the significant benefits to consumers and advertisers, and doesn't provide a clear legal theory to connect its claims with its proposed remedy.

Our response provides evidence and data to show why the SO’s concerns are unfounded. We use traffic analysis to rebut claims that our ad displays and specialized organic results harmed competition by preventing shopping aggregators from reaching consumers. Economic data spanning more than a decade, an array of documents, and statements from complainants all confirm that product search is robustly competitive. And we show why the SO is incorrect in failing to consider the impact of major shopping services like Amazon and eBay, who are the largest players in this space.

The universe of shopping services has seen an enormous increase in traffic from Google, diverse new players, new investments, and expanding consumer choice. Google delivered more than 20 billion free clicks to aggregators over the last decade in the countries covered by the SO, with free traffic increasing by 227% (and total traffic increasing even more).

Moreover, the ways people search for, compare, and buy products are rapidly evolving. Users on desktop and mobile devices often want to go straight to trusted merchants who have established an online presence. These kinds of developments reflect a dynamic and competitive industry, where companies are continuing to evolve their business models and online and offline markets are converging.

But our central point is our consistent commitment to quality -- the relevance and usefulness of our search results and the ads we display. In providing results for people interested in shopping, we knew we needed to go beyond the old-fashioned “10 blue links” model to keep up with our competitors and better serve our users and advertisers. We developed new ways to organize and rank product information and to present it to users in useful formats in search and ads. In 2012, as part of that effort, in addition to our traditional ads, we introduced the Google Shopping Unit as a new ad format:

We don’t think this format is anti-competitive. On the contrary, showing ads based on structured data provided by merchants demonstrably improves ad quality and makes it easier for consumers to find what they’re looking for. We show these ad groups where we’ve always shown ads -- to the right and at the top of organic results -- and we use specialized algorithms to maximize their relevance for users. Data from users and advertisers confirms they like these formats. That’s not “favoring” -- that’s giving our customers and advertisers what they find most useful.

The SO also seeks a peculiar and problematic remedy, requiring that Google show ads sourced and ranked by other companies within our advertising space. We show in our response that this would harm the quality and relevance our results. And, in a report submitted with our response, former President of the General Court Bo Vesterdorf outlines why such an obligation could be legally justified only where a company has a duty to supply its own rivals – as where it controls an input that is both essential and not available anywhere else (like gas or electricity). Given the many ways to reach consumers on the Internet, the SO doesn't argue that standard applies here.

Our search engine is designed to provide the most relevant results and most useful ads for any query. Users and advertisers benefit when we do this well. So does Google. It’s in our interest to provide high-quality results and ads that connect people to what they’re looking for. The more relevant the ads -- the better they perform in connecting potential buyers and sellers -- the more value they generate for everyone.

Throughout the almost 17 years since Google started, our engineers have been developing innovative approaches to search and ads that are valuable for both users and advertisers. In the video below you can hear from our engineers about how our services have evolved to give people better results and ads. We are proud of their work and eager to tell their story.

We believe that the SO's preliminary conclusions are wrong as a matter of fact, law, and economics. We look forward to discussing our response and supporting evidence with the Commission, in the interest of promoting user choice and open competition.

Posted by Kent Walker, SVP & General Counsel

Android has helped create more choice and innovation on mobile than ever before

It's hard to believe, but smartphones barely existed ten years ago. People used feature phones, which had very basic functionality, and were a nightmare for developers. The only way to build apps was device by device and platform by platform—Google had a closet full of hundreds of phones that we tested one by one each time we wanted to launch new software.

Android was born from this frustration. We hoped that by offering a great, free open-source operating system, we could turbocharge innovation by allowing manufacturers and developers to focus on what they do best. At the time, most people thought this plan was nuts.

Fast forward to today. The pace of mobile innovation has never been greater. Smartphones are being adopted globally at an increasingly fast pace, with over hundreds of millions shipped each quarter, and the average smartphone price fell 23% between 2012 and 2014. It’s now possible to purchase a powerful smartphone, without subsidies or contracts, for under $100. And the app ecosystem has exploded, giving consumers more choice than ever before.

Android has been a key player in spurring this competition and choice, lowering prices and increasing choice for everyone (there are over 18,000 different devices available today);

• It’s an open-source operating system that can be used free-of-charge by anyone—that’s right, literally anyone. And it’s not just phones. Today people are building almost anything with Android—including tablets, watches, TVs, cars, and more. Some Android devices use Google services, and others do not.
• Our Google Play store contains over one million apps and we paid out over $7 billion in revenue over the past year to developers and content publishers.
• Apps that compete directly with Google such as Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft Office, and Expedia are easily available to Android users. Indeed many of these apps come pre-loaded onto Android devices in addition to Google apps. The recent Samsung S6 is a great example of this, including pre-installed apps from Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.
• Developers have a choice of platforms and over 80% of developers are building apps for several different mobile operating systems.

The European Commission has asked questions about our partner agreements. It's important to remember that these are voluntary—again, you can use Android without Google—but provide real benefits to Android users, developers and the broader ecosystem.

Anti-fragmentation agreements, for example, ensure apps work across all sorts of different Android devices. (After all, it would be pretty frustrating if an app you downloaded on one phone didn’t also work on your eventual replacement phone.) And our app distribution agreements make sure that people get a great "out of the box" experience with useful apps right there on the home screen (how many of us could get through our day without maps or email?). This also helps manufacturers of Android devices compete with Apple, Microsoft and other mobile ecosystems that come preloaded with similar baseline apps. And remember that these distribution agreements are not exclusive, and Android manufacturers install their own apps and apps from other companies as well. And in comparison to Apple—the world’s most profitable (mobile) phone company—there are far fewer Google apps pre-installed on Android phones than Apple apps on iOS devices.

We are thankful for Android’s success and we understand that with success comes scrutiny. But it's not just Google that has benefited from Android's success. The Android model has let manufacturers compete on their unique innovations. Developers can reach huge audiences and build strong businesses. And consumers now have unprecedented choice at ever-lower prices. We look forward to discussing these issues in more detail with the European Commission over the months ahead.

Hiroshi Lockheimer, VP of Engineering, Android

The Search for Harm

In the summer of 2010, Google announced plans to acquire the flight search provider, ITA. As we said at the time, while many people buy their airline tickets online, finding the right flight at the best price can be a real hassle. Today Google Flight Search has made that much easier. Search for "Flight CDG to SFO" and you get the different options right there on the results page. It’s a great example of Google’s increasing ability to answer queries directly, saving people a lot of time and effort—because as Larry Page said over a decade ago “the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want."

At the time of the ITA acquisition, several online travel companies—Expedia, Kayak, and Travelocity--unsuccessfully lobbied regulators in the US and the European Union to block the deal, arguing that our ability to show flight options directly would siphon off their traffic and harm competition online. Four years later it’s clear their allegations of harm turned out to be untrue. As the Washington Post recently pointed out (in an article headed “Google Flight Search, four years in: not the competition-killer critics feared”) Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity account for 95% of the US online travel market today. It’s a similar situation in Europe too, as this graph for Germany neatly shows:

Travel sites in Germany

Source: ComScore MMX and Google data (for Google), desktop traffic, unique visitors (‘000s)

We’ve seen similar allegations of harm from competitors in other areas. And the European Commission today confirmed that it is sending Google a Statement of Objections (SO) regarding the display and ranking of shopping results.

While Google may be the most used search engine, people can now find and access information in numerous different ways—and allegations of harm, for consumers and competitors, have proved to be wide of the mark.

More choice than ever before
In fact, people have more choice than ever before.

• There are numerous other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, Quora, DuckDuckGo and a new wave of search assistants like Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.
• In addition, there are a ton of specialized services like Amazon, Idealo, Le Guide, Expedia or eBay. For example, Amazon, eBay, and Axel Springer’s Idealo are the three most popular shopping services in Germany.
• People are increasingly using social sites like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter to find recommendations, such as where to eat, which movies to watch or how to decorate their homes.
• When it comes to news, users have many ways to reach their favorite sites. For example, Bild gets more than 85% of its traffic from sources other than Google and other search engines.*

Of course mobile is changing things as well. Today 7 out of every 8 minutes on mobile devices is spent within apps—in other words consumers are going to whichever websites or apps serve them best. And they face no friction or costs in switching between them. Yelp, for example, has told investors they get over 40% of their searches direct from their mobile apps.* So while in many ways it’s flattering to be described as a gatekeeper, the facts don’t actually bear that out.

Thriving competition online
Which brings me to the competition. Companies like Axel Springer, Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Yelp (all vociferous complainants in this process) have alleged that Google’s practice of including our specialized results (Flight Search, Maps, Local results, etc.) in search has significantly harmed their businesses. But their traffic, revenues and profits (as well as the pitch they make to investors) tell a very different story.

• Yelp calls itself the “de facto local search engine” and has seen revenue growth of over 350% in the last four years.
• TripAdvisor claims to be the Web’s largest travel brand and has nearly doubled its revenues in the last four years.
• Expedia has grown its revenues by more than 67% over the same period—and recently told investors: “We're seeing increased traffic coming through Google Hotel Finder. It is ­clearly getting more exposure. And in general … the product continues to improve. And Google has invested in it, we'll continue to invest in it … From our standpoint, we're happy to play in any market that Google puts out there and over a long period of time, we have proven an ability to get our fair share in the Google marketplaces.” (Remarkable given their complaints.)
• Axel Springer continues to invest in search, including the French search engine Qwant, because as the company told investors, “there is a lot of innovation on the search market.”

Indeed if you look at shopping—an area where we have seen a lot of complaints and where the European Commission has focused in its Statement of Objections—it’s clear that (a) there’s a ton of competition (including from Amazon and eBay, two of the biggest shopping sites in the world) and (b) Google’s shopping results have not harmed the competition. Take a look at these graphs:

Shopping Sites in Germany (unique visitors, ‘000s)

Shopping Sites in France (unique visitors, ‘000s)

Shopping Sites in the UK (unique visitors, ‘000s)

Any economist would say that you typically do not see a ton of innovation, new entrants or investment in sectors where competition is stagnating—or dominated by one player. Yet that is exactly what’s happening in our world. Zalando, the German shopping site, went public in 2014 in one of Europe’s biggest-ever tech IPOs. Companies like Facebook, Pinterest and Amazon have been investing in their own search services and search engines like Quixey, DuckDuckGo and Qwant have attracted new funding. We’re seeing innovation in voice search and the rise of search assistants—with even more to come.

It’s why we respectfully but strongly disagree with the need to issue a Statement of Objections and look forward to making our case over the weeks ahead.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President, Google Search

*Update: An earlier version of this post quoted traffic figures for Bild and The Guardian, researched on a third-party site. The Guardian data were for the domain guardian.co.uk, which is no longer the main domain for the paper. We’ve removed these references and we’re sorry for the error. Yelp has pointed out that they get 40% of their searches (not their traffic) direct from their mobile apps. They don’t appear to disclose their traffic numbers. We’re happy to correct the record.

Settlement with the European Commission

Following three rounds of negotiations and significant concessions, we are glad to have now reached an agreement with the European Commission that addresses its competition concerns.

Commissioner Almunia laid out the details of that settlement at a press conference last week, including:

• Changes to our AdSense terms to make it even easier for publishers to place ads on their sites from multiple providers;
• Changes to our AdWords API terms to make it even easier for software providers to build tools for advertisers to manage campaigns across platforms;
• New rules regarding how we will use website content in vertical search services; and
• Changes to our UI that will give rival services significant prominence (and valuable screen space) on our search results pages. You can see what this looks like here.

In addition, our suggested changes have (unusually) been through two separate “market tests” which enabled the Commission to hear directly from a number of our competitors, as well as third parties. In response to their feedback, we made two rounds of significant further changes to our initial proposals. Today, to ensure that everyone understands the wide-ranging nature of this settlement, we are taking the (again unusual) step of publishing the full text of the agreement.

While this process has been challenging, we are pleased to have a resolution of these issues and look forward to a continued focus on providing new generations of great services for our users.

Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice-President and General Counsel

Moving Forward

For the past two years we’ve worked closely with the European Commission to settle their inquiry into our search and advertising businesses. We’ve put a lot of effort into addressing the Commission’s concerns, and earlier this year, after a good bit of back-and-forth with the Commission, we proposed a package of measures that the Commission felt comfortable testing in the marketplace.

The Commission subsequently asked us to go even further, including giving rival sites much more visibility in our search results. (The Commission has since confirmed that it seeks to promote visibility rather than to mandate where consumers click.) We addressed these requests with our revised offer, which broadens the scope of our offer and provides links to rival sites even more prominently in our search results. Specifically:

• We will give links to rival sites much more real estate and visibility
• We will include rival sites’ logos with these links for even greater prominence
• We will accompany these links with dynamic text from rivals providing more information about their sites

This news was widely reported in the press and you can see screenshots of these proposed links here.

As European Commission Vice President Joaquin Almunia said in a recent speech, the issue is choice for consumers. We've worked closely with a knowledgeable and professional team at the Commission to deliver just that. Users will be presented with alternative specialized search options right in the middle of some of the most valuable and prominent space on our search page. It is hard to see how anybody could reasonably claim that this will not offer users choice.

These weren’t easy concessions to make. Within Google, many asked why we would agree to such unprecedented and far-reaching changes to our continuously evolving search results. But we didn’t want to spend a decade fighting over these issues. We wanted to move forward, letting our engineers continue to do what they do best: building products that help users in their everyday lives.

Of course, we will never satisfy some critics, especially those with a professional and financial interest in impeding a successful competitor rather than helping users. As Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Some in the anti-Google camp have lobbied for remedies that would help themselves at a cost to consumers. Others have worked to prolong the process to keep us in regulatory limbo, filing new complaints timed to disrupt our settlement negotiations. These complainants continue to recycle claims with no basis in law or fact, while failing to present constructive or realistic suggestions that would benefit consumers.

We’ve gone the extra mile to come up with a settlement that will resolve the Commission’s expressed concerns and allow everyone to focus on competing on the merits and creating innovative new services for consumers. We look forward to bringing this matter to a sound and reasonable conclusion.

Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel

Answers people want

You expect Google to give you the very best search results. Just the right information, at just the right time, without hassle or cost. We started out by showing you ten blue links. Advances in computer science now let us provide richer and better answers, saving a lot of time and effort. If you search for the “height of the Eiffel Tower”, that’s probably what you want - right there on your screen or mobile phone, not several clicks away. So that’s what we give you. Ask Google for places to eat in New York and we aim to show pictures of restaurants, plus reviews, prices, hours, location, directions, and more. All right there, with no extra effort required.

We’ve been discussing these innovations with the European Commission as they have reviewed our search and advertising business. We know that scrutiny comes along with success, and we have worked hard to answer their questions thoroughly and thoughtfully. When the Commission outlined four areas of "preliminary" concern last summer, we submitted proposals to address each point in a constructive way. Our proposals are meaningful and comprehensive, providing additional choice and information while also leaving room for future innovation. As we’ve always said, we build Google for users, not websites. And we don’t want to hamper the very innovations that people like best about Google’s services. That’s why we focused on addressing the Commission’s specific concerns, and we think we did a pretty good job.

The Internet is the greatest level playing field ever. More and more, people are voting with their feet (or at least their cursors), getting information from apps, general and specialised search engines, social networks, and a multitude of websites. That free flow of information means that millions of websites (including ours) now compete directly for business, bringing you more information, lower prices, and more choice. We very much appreciate the Commission’s professionalism and integrity throughout this process, and look forward to reaching a sensible solution.

Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel

Spanish teenagers capture a Google Science Fair prize

Some of the world’s brightest young scientists gathered at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View this week to present their projects to a panel of renowned judges at the Google Science Fair finals.

The 15 finalists were chosen from thousands of projects from more than 100 countries. Their work covered a wide variety of topics: from cancer research to vertical farming, 3D electronics to dementia. It was a tough decision, but we’re proud to name three projects as winners of this year’s Google Science Fair, including one project from Spain:

• 13-14 age category: Jonah Kohn (USA)—“Good Vibrations: Improving the Music Experience for People with Hearing Loss Using Multi-Frequency Tactile Sound.” By creating a device that converts sound into tactile vibrations, Jonah’s project attempts to provide the hearing impaired with an improved experience listening to music.
  
• 15-16 age category: Iván Hervías Rodríguez, Marcos Ochoa and Sergio Pascual (Spain)—“La Vida Oculta del Agua (The Secret Life of Water).” Iván, Marcos and Sergio studied hidden microscopic life in fresh water, documenting the organisms that exist in a drop of water, and how those organisms influence our environment.
  
• 17-18 age category AND Grand Prize Winner: Brittany Wenger (USA)—“Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer.” Brittany’s project harnesses the power of the cloud to help doctors accurately diagnose breast cancer. Brittany built an application that compares individual test results to an extensive dataset stored in the cloud, allowing doctors to assess tumors using a minimally-invasive procedure.
  

Each of the winners will receive prizes from Google and our Science Fair partners: CERN, LEGO, National Geographic and Scientific American. This evening, we also recognized Sakhiwe Shongwe and Bonkhe Mahlalela, from Swaziland, the winners of the Scientific American Science in Action award.

The judges were impressed with the quality of all the projects this year—and by the ingenuity, dedication and passion of the young scientists who created them. We applaud every contestant who submitted a project to the 2012 Google Science Fair and look forward to seeing the innovations, inventions and discoveries of young scientists in the years to come.


Posted by Cristin Frodella, Google in Education

European Commission clears Motorola deal

Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog

We’re happy that today the European Commission approved our proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility, which we announced in August. This is an important milestone in the approval process and it moves us closer to closing the deal. We are now just waiting for decisions from a few other jurisdictions before we can close this transaction.

As we outlined in August, the combination of Google and Motorola Mobility will help supercharge Android. It will also enhance competition and offer consumers faster innovation, greater choice and wonderful user experiences.

Posted by Don Harrison, Vice President and Deputy Counsel

Ask your question in the 2012 Google Science Fair

Are human beings born curious, or can curiosity be nurtured through environment, competition or a good teacher? Everyone’s got a question—that’s ours. But we’re sure you’ve got tons of questions, too. Today, we’re inviting students around the world to pose their most pressing questions about the world around them and answer those questions through scientific inquiry.

Along with our partners CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, today we’re launching the second annual Google Science Fair, the largest online science competition in the world, open globally to students ages 13-18. Either individually or in teams of up to three people, students pose a question, develop a hypothesis and conduct science experiments to test it. The entire process is detailed and submitted online, via a website template participants fill out themselves, so all you need to participate is curiosity, an Internet connection and a browser.



Last year, we received entries that strove to solve a wide variety of needs, from “How can I cure cancer?” to “Can I teach a robot to learn English?” to “Can I build a faster sailboat?” The breadth and depth of these projects was incredibly impressive, and this year we hope to see even more entries from the next generation of brilliant young scientists.

This year’s fair will be even more global than the last: We’re now accepting submissions in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Russia). We will also be recognizing 90 regional finalists (30 from the Americas, 30 from the Asia Pacific and 30 from Europe/Middle East/Africa). From these 90, to be announced in May, our judges will select the top 15 finalists, who will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. for our live Google Science Fair final event on July 23, 2012. At the finals, a panel of distinguished international judges (like Vint Cerf, Sylvia Earle and Nobel Laureates David Gross and Ada Yonath) will select top winners in each age category (13-14, 15-16, 17-18).

We’re also introducing a new category for this year’s competition—the Scientific American Science in Action award. We were so inspired by 2011 finalist Harine Ravichandran’s project, which attempted to solve energy surges in rural villages, that we decided to recognize an outstanding project that addresses a social, environmental or health need to make a difference in the lives of a group or community, as Harine’s project did for her grandparents’ village in India. The winner will also be flown to Mountain View for the finalist event in July.

The Google Science Fair opens today, January 12, worldwide, and we’ll accept submissions until Sunday, April 1 at 11:59pm GMT (or 6:59pm ET/3:59pm PT). In addition to satisfying your curious mind, your brilliant project can also help to win you some pretty cool prizes, like a $50,000 college scholarship from Google, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer or an internship at Google or any one of our partners. Our Scientific American Science in Action award winner will earn $50,000 and year-long mentorship to make their project goal a reality.

The winners of last year’s inaugural Google Science Fair became something like scientific rock stars. Shree Bose, Naomi Shah and Lauren Hodge met with President Obama, were invited to speak at big events like TEDx Women and were featured in Wired magazine. Shree, our grand prize winner, was named one of Glamour magazine’s 21 Amazing Young Women of the Year. White House visits and Glamour aside, every student in the Google Science Fair has the chance to do hands-on research that can truly change the world.

Visit google.com/sciencefair and ask your most burning questions at the top of your voice for the world to hear. Google itself was founded through experimentation and with the Google Science Fair, we hope to inspire scientific exploration among the next generation of scientists and engineers, celebrate scientific talent, create scientific role models and unite students around the world in the quest for learning.

Posted by Cristin Frodella, Google Education Team

Our thoughts on the European Commission review

At Google, we’ve always focused on putting the user first by providing the best possible answers as quickly as possible - and our product innovation and engineering talent have delivered results that users seem to like, in a world where the competition is only one click away. However, given our success and the disruptive nature of our business, it’s entirely understandable that we’ve caused unease among other companies and caught the attention of regulators. Today, the European Commission has announced that they will continue to review complaints about Google's search and search advertising. We respect their process and will continue to work closely with the Commission to answer their questions.

So that everyone understands how we approach search and ads ranking, we thought it would be helpful to state clearly the principles that guide our business:

• Answering users' queries accurately and quickly is our number one goal. Sometimes the best, most relevant answer to a query is our traditional “ten blue links”, and sometimes it is a news article, sports score, stock quote, video, or a map. Today, when you type in “weather in London” or “15 grams in ounces” you get the answers directly (often before you even hit Enter). In the future, we will need to answer much more complex questions just as fast and as clearly. We believe ads are information too, which is why we work so hard to ensure that the advertisements you see are directly relevant to what you are looking for;

• We built Google for users, not websites. It may seem obvious, but people sometimes forget this -- not every website can come out on top, or even appear on the first page of our results, so there will almost always be website owners who are unhappy about their rankings. The most important thing is that we satisfy our users.

• We are always clear when we have been paid for promoting a product or service. Before we launched Google, many search engines took money for inclusion in their results without making that clear to users. We have never done that and we always distinguished advertising content from our organic search results. As we experiment with new ad formats and types of content, we promise to continue to be transparent about payments.

• We aim to be as transparent as possible. We provide more information about how our ranking works than any other major search engine, through our webmaster central site, blog, diagnostic tools, support forum, and YouTube channel. We give our advertisers information about the ad auction, tips on how to improve their ad quality scores, and the ability to simulate their bids to give them more transparency. And we’re committed to increasing that transparency going forward. At the same time, we don’t want to help people game our system. We do everything we can to ensure that the integrity of our results isn’t compromised.

Our final principle: the only constant is change. We’ve been working on this stuff for well over a decade, and in that time our search technology has improved by leaps and bounds. Our results are continuing to evolve from a list of websites to something far more dynamic. Today there’s real-time content, automatically translated content, local content (especially important for mobile devices), images, videos, books, and a whole lot more. Users can search by voice -- and in a variety of languages. And we’ve developed new ad formats such as product listing ads and new pricing models such as cost-per-action. We cannot predict where search and online advertising will be headed, but we know for sure that they won’t stay the same. By staying focused on innovation we can continue to make search even better -- for the benefit of users everywhere.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Senior Vice President, Product Management and Udi Manber, Vice President, Engineering

Google, transparency and our not-so-secret formula

Recently the European Commission opened a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints. Part of the complaint alleges that Google operates without sufficient transparency into how and why web sites rank in our search results. The notion that Google isn't transparent is tough for me to swallow. Google has set the standard in how we communicate with web site publishers. Let me tell you about some of the ways we explain to sites how we rank them and why.

One of the most widely-discussed parts of Google's scoring has always been PageRank. That "secret ingredient" is hardly a secret. Here it is. That early paper not only gave the formula for PageRank, but mentioned many of the other signals in Google's ranking, including anchor text, the location of words within documents, the relative proximity of query words in a document, the size and type of fonts used, the raw HTML of each page, and capitalization of words. Google has continued to publish literally hundreds of research papers over the years. Those papers reveal many of the "secret formulas" for how Google works and document essential infrastructure that Google uses. Some of these papers have spurred not only open-source projects but entire companies in their own right.

Academic papers are one thing, but Google also aims to engage and educate in many other ways. In 1999, Sergey Brin participated in the first Search Engine Strategies conference for webmasters. In 2001, Google became one of the first search engines to engage online at a publisher forum called WebmasterWorld. One representative (GoogleGuy) has posted over 2800 times, while another (AdWordsAdvisor) has posted almost 5000 times.

Google's efforts at transparency and communication have evolved with the web. We started blogging in May 2004 and have written thousands of posts on our official blog. Google now has over 70 official blogs, including an official webmaster blog specifically to help site owners understand how Google works and help them rank appropriately in our search results. Google publishes more blog posts than almost any other large company. We also provide extensive public documentation on our web site with advice for publishers, in dozens of different languages.

As the head of Google's webspam team (which tries to stop attempts to violate our clearly documented, public webmaster guidelines), people often ask me questions about how Google works. That's why I started my own personal blog in 2005 and have written hundreds of posts about Google. The topics range from common web site mistakes to advice for new bloggers. I've had the pleasure of speaking to web site owners or doing public web site reviews at over 30 different search conferences. In fact, I'll be answering questions at another search conference this week - along with a dozen or so Google colleagues.

We've tried all sorts of experiments to help site owners understand how Google's search ranking works. We've done multiple live webmaster chats online with hundreds of simultaneous participants. We've experimented with tweeting. We've participated in podcasts. And here's one of my favorite ways we've helped to break out of the black box and give advice to publishers: in the past year, we've taken questions from the public and posted hundreds of video answers on a webmaster video channel. Those videos have been watched over 1.5 million times (!). We also engage online across the blogosphere to answer questions about Google's practices.

The list goes on and on. Google has reached out to other search engines on methods to make life easier for website owners. The resulting standards include specifying preferred web site url formats as well as Sitemaps, an easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about the pages on their site. Google provides a webmaster forum where both Google employees and helpful outside "superusers" hang out and answer questions about specific sites. We've run in-person website clinics to provide specific one-on-one feedback and advice in locations from San Francisco to India to Russia to virtual site clinics in Spanish. We've even confirmed ranking signals that Google doesn't use in our algorithms, such as the keywords meta tag, which saves site owners from doing needless work and helps avoid frivolous lawsuits.

The frustrating thing is that even if all 20,000 employees at Google worked full-time on answering questions from website publishers, we still couldn't talk to every site owner. Why not? Because the web has over 192 million domain names registered. That's why we introduced Google Webmaster Tools, a one-stop location to provide scalable, self-service information and to let webmasters provide us with data. Describing the powerful tools we provide to site owners for free would take an entire other blog post, but a number of the offerings include:

• Site owners can get recommendations about issues like duplicate meta descriptions or missing title tags.
• Site owners who we believe have violated our webmaster guidelines and where Google has taken corresponding action regarding their site in our index can submit a request for reconsideration.
• Site owners who have been hacked can get details about malware on their site. After they remove the hacked content, they can fetch pages from their site as Googlebot to make sure the malicious content is really gone.
• Site owners can find out about errors that Google encountered while crawling their site.

A Google employee recently blogged about using these free, public tools to diagnose an issue with his webhost where he had exceeded his bandwidth quota. Millions of webmasters have taken similar advantage of Google's free tools for site owners to get helpful information about their site.

At Google, we try to be as open as we can, even to the point of helping users export their data out of Google's products. At the same time, we don't think it's unreasonable for any business to have some trade secrets, not least because we don’t want to help spammers and crackers game our system. If people who are trying to game search rankings knew every single detail about how we rank sites, it would be easier for them to 'spam' our results with pages that are not relevant and are frustrating to users -- including porn and malware sites.

Ultimately, criticizing Google for its "secret formula" is an easy claim to make, but it just isn't true. Google has worked day after day for years to be open, to educate publishers about how we rank sites, and to answer questions from both publishers and our users. So if that's how people choose to define "secret," then ours must be the worst kept secret in the world of search.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Search Quality Team

This stuff is tough

Yesterday's news that the European Commission has opened a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints from three companies has generated a lot of questions about how Google's ranking works. Here, Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow responsible for ranking, who has worked in search for almost 20 years, explains the principles behind our algorithm.

Pop quiz. Get ready. You're only going to have a few milliseconds to answer this question, so look sharp. Here goes: "know the way to San Jose?" Now display the answer on a screen that’s about 14 inches wide and 12 inches tall. Find the answer from among billions and billions of documents. Wait a second - is this for directions or are we talking about the song? Too late. Just find the answer and display it. Now on to the next question. Because you'll have to answer hundreds of millions each day to do well at this test. And in case you find yourself getting too good at it, don’t worry: at least 20% of those questions you get every day you’ll have never seen before. Sound hard? Welcome to the wild world of search at Google. More specifically, welcome to the world of ranking.

Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to seek out relevant and useful results for a user's query. There's a ton that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system like ours. 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. Those signals and our algorithms are in constant flux, and are constantly being improved. On average, we make one or two changes to them every day. Lately, I’ve been reading about whether regulators should look into dictating how search engines like Google conduct their ranking. While the debate unfolds about government-regulated search, let me provide some general thinking behind our approach to ranking. Future ranking experts (inside or outside government) might find it helpful. Our philosophy has three main elements:

1. Algorithmically-generated results.
2. No query left behind.
3. Keep it simple.

After nearly two decades, I’ve lost count of how many times I've been asked why Google chooses to generate its search results algorithmically. Here's how we see it: the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are utilizing all this human contribution through our algorithms to order and rank our results. We think that's a much better solution than a hand-arranged one. Other search engines approach this differently -- selecting some results one at a time, manually curating what you see on the page. We believe that approach which relies heavily on an individual's tastes and preferences just doesn't produce the quality and relevant ranking that our algorithms do. And given the hundreds of millions of queries we have to handle every day, it wouldn't be feasible to handle each by hand anyway.

This brings me to the next point: leaving no query behind. Usually once I've explained to people the thinking behind algorithmically-generated results, some will ask me, "But what if you do a search, and the results you see are just plain lousy? Why wouldn't you just go in there by hand and change them?" The part of this question that's valid is in terms of lousy results. It happens. It happens all the time. Every day we get the right answers for people, and every day we get stumped. And we love getting stumped. Because more often than not, a broken query is just a symptom of a potential improvement to be made to our ranking algorithm. Improving the underlying algorithm not only improves that one query, it improves an entire class of queries, and often for all languages around the world in over 100 countries. I should add, however, that we do have clear written policies for websites that are included in our results, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (such as legal requirements, child porn, spam, viruses/malware, etc.). But those cases are quite different from the notion of rearranging the page you see one result at a time.

Finally, simplicity. This seems pretty obvious. Isn't it the desire of all system architects to keep their systems simple? We work very hard to keep our system simple without compromising on the quality of results. This is an ongoing effort, and a worthy one. Our commitment to simplicity has allowed us innovate quickly, and it shows.

Ultimately, search is nowhere near a solved problem. Although I've been at this for almost two decades now, I'd still guess that search isn't quite out of its infancy yet. The science is probably just about at the point where we're crawling. Soon we'll walk. I hope that in my lifetime, I'll see search enter its adolescence.

In the meantime, we're working hard at our ongoing pop quizzes. Here's one last one: "search engine." In 0.14 seconds from among a few hundred million pages, our initial results are: AltaVista, Dogpile Web Search, Bing and Ask.com. I guess I'd better get back to work.

Posted by: Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Update 2 March, 10:30am

First of all, let me thank everyone for their kind comments and honest views in this discussion. Gary, I love search, after having done search for almost 20 years, I still come into work every morning like a kid going to a candy store. Alongside my passion for search, one fact that keeps me so excited is that what was science fiction in search research twenty years ago is now coming to fruition at Google. The semantic systems we have built are something I didn't expect to build in my lifetime. Secondly, Google has given me an environment where researchers like me can practice search in its pure algorithmic form. I can't put in words how incredibly satisfying this combination is for a search geek like me :-)

Posted by: Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Committed to competing fairly

As Google has grown, we've not surprisingly faced more questions about our role in the advertising ecosystem and our overall approach to competition. This kind of scrutiny goes with the territory when you are a large company. However, we've always worked hard to ensure that our success is earned the right way -- through technological innovation and great products, rather than by locking in our users or advertisers, or creating artificial barriers to entry.

The European Commission has notified us that it has received complaints from three companies: a UK price comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine called ejustice.fr, and Microsoft's Ciao! from Bing. While we will be providing feedback and additional information on these complaints, we are confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners, as well as in line with European competition law.

Given that these complaints will generate interest in the media, we wanted to provide some background to them. First, search. Foundem - a member of an organisation called ICOMP which is funded partly by Microsoft - argues that our algorithms demote their site in our results because they are a vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google. ejustice.fr's complaint seems to echo these concerns.

We understand how important rankings can be to websites, especially commercial ones, because a higher ranking typically drives higher volumes of traffic. We are also the first to admit that our search is not perfect, but it's a very hard computer science problem to crack. Imagine having to rank the 272 million possible results for a popular query like the iPod on a 14 by 12 screen computer screen in just a few milliseconds. It's a challenge we face millions of times each day.

Our algorithms aim to rank first what people are most likely to find useful and we have nothing against vertical search sites -- indeed many vertical search engines like Moneysupermarket.com, Opodo and Expedia typically rank high in Google's results. For more information on this issue check out our guidelines for webmasters and advertisers, and for an independent analysis of Foundem's ranking issues please read this report by Econsultancy.

Regarding Ciao!, they were a long-time AdSense partner of Google's, with whom we always had a good relationship. However, after Microsoft acquired Ciao! in 2008 (renaming it Ciao! from Bing) we started receiving complaints about our standard terms and conditions. They initially took their case to the German competition authority, but it now has been transferred to Brussels.

Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners. This is not the case. We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users' interests first and to compete fair and square in the market. We believe our business practices reflect those commitments.

Posted by Julia Holtz, Senior Competition Counsel

Boosting user choice for browsers

The European Commission today announced an important decision designed to inject more competition into the crucial market for Internet browsers. Under the Commission decision, more than 100 million Europeans will soon receive an opportunity to download a new browser. On both new and old computers that run Internet Explorer, a ballot screen will pop up on their computers displaying icons of the major browser makers and allowing them to choose among them with a simple click.

Browsers are critical to the Internet; they enable us to surf the web, search, chat, email, watch videos, or connect to our social networks. The game changing apps of the past few years -- Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others -- have all been built online. Most of the modern computing experience already happens inside the browser and many of the remaining computing tasks inside the PC soon could be done more efficiently and elegantly online in the "cloud."

Most people already spend more time using their browsers than they do in their cars. If unleashed, we believe PC browsers could allow an exponential impact on Internet innovation. That's why we launched our own browser Chrome and why we are soon launching a full-fledged browser operating system called Chrome OS, which will further increase the speed, simplicity and security of online computing.

In coming months, millions of Europeans will have an opportunity to learn more about the importance of browsers. We plan to continue educating consumers by participating in initiatives such as the site www.whatbrowser.org and opening our own dialogue with users, confident that more competition in the browser space will mean a better user experience for people everywhere.

Posted By Sundar Pichai, Vice President Product Management