On Wednesday, we reported that Google was facing an antitrust enquiry by the European Commission, which had received complaints that its search results were unfairly balanced against competitors, and that it maintains artificially high advertising prices.
Now Google has hit back, maintaining that its search service is impartial and that it doesn't even have the number 1 spot for a search on the term 'search engine'.
Writing on Google European Public Policy Blog, Google Fellow Amit Singhal explained the principles behind the search engine's algorithm.
To summarise, Singhal explains that Google's search philosophy has three main strands: 'algorithmically-generated results'; 'no query left behind'; and 'keep it simple'.
Singhal believes that algorithmically-generated results are better quality and more relevant than hand-arranged ones; that improving the algorithm for one query benefits the results for hundreds of others; and that simplicity allows Google to innovate quickly.
He also agrees that search is still in its infancy. As he puts it:
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.
It's going to be an interesting battle.
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