WalletHub - Google Quality Issues: Part of an Intentional Strategy?

Senior reporter Karina Montoya was listed as an expert to discuss the decline in Google's search quality and its potential impact on users.

The Google search trial made it very clear that Google has the ability to severely degrade its search results quality without losing market share or revenues. Google itself tested that even if it stripped its index of massive data sets (picture something like getting rid of content sets the size of two Wikipedias), its global search revenues would decline less than 1%. Google also tested that for many popular search queries, Bing had superior loading times. The fact is that, as a monopolist, Google has no real incentives to improve the quality of its search results. This is a reality not only for Google, but for plenty of other sectors where dominant companies face no significant challengers.

Something that caught my attention during the search trial is that Google did not dispute that it consistently and gradually increased prices for search text ads while it degraded the quality of those ads (by blocking access to granular search query report information and preventing advertisers from opting out of certain features, such as keyword matching). To Google, those were just "experiments" because they can 'never be sure' of the 'real value' they deliver to advertisers (I remember this phrasing in particular), and that this proved nothing about its monopoly power. However, we saw at the end of the trial, that this was one of the key factors Judge Mehta considered to find Google liable for illegally maintaining a monopoly over search. I think this should serve as an important framework for how a monopolist runs a business vs companies that can realistically compete based on the real and perceived quality of their products.

Read full article here.