Google denies 'cooking' search results to favour its own services

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has strenuously denied accusations that Google manipulates search results to favour its own services over rivals', during a two-hour grilling by US senators on Wednesday.

Republican senator Mike Lee aggressively went after Google during the hearing, using slides to demonstrate that Google's Product Search service repeatedly comes third in search results and that the results are not organic.

"Google shopping ranked third in virtually every instance. There are a few outliers where you're first, or fourth or 11th, but never 12th, certainly never 50th or anything close, yet every one of the others finds itself everywhere along this spectrum," he said.

"It seems to me that this is an uncanny statistical coincidence. I don't know whether 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."

However, Schmidt denied the accusations, replying sharply: "Senator, may I simply say that I can assure you we've not 'cooked' anything."

Schmidt added that the services being compared with Google - Shopper, Pricegrabber and Nextag - are not fair examples as they are price comparison sites, not product search sites. "It's an apples to oranges comparison," he said.

Schmidt also submitted a written testimony (PDF) in which he talked up the capabilities of Google's core rivals in the search market, i.e. Facebook and Microsoft, and argued that internet users can find a wealth of information "without ever using Google".

"Microsoft's Bing has continued to gain in popularity, perhaps because it comes preinstalled as the search default on over 70 per cent of new computers sold. Bing is the exclusive search provider for Yahoo and Facebook," he said.

"Because of its exclusive search arrangement with Bing, Facebook and Bing can harness the power of search algorithms and a customer's social graph to answer a query. This is a tremendous competitive advantage."