Some readers may be aware that an anti-trust action is brewing against the web giant Google. In February, a search outfit called 'Foundem' fired a salvo of complaints against Google in both the EU and the US.

Yesterday, Foundem's complaints were strengthened when Ben Edelman claimed to have found a 'smoking gun'.

The Complaint

The complaint centres around Google promoting it's own services within search results. For example, if you search for an address, Google will display output from it's Google Maps service at the top.

Whilst this is clearly very useful for individuals, the complaint is that this has an unfair effect on businesses that compete with Google. The issue is that Google's services are always displayed as the first result despite the fact that better services may exist.

The theory goes that any company could be unfairly disadvantaged if Google opted to enter their market.

The Smoking Gun

Part of the argument centres on whether or not this is a deliberate action. If Google's algorithms consider Google's service the most relevant result, this poses less of an issue than if Google have manually instructed their system to behave in the way it does.

Ben Edelman claims to have proof that Google have manually intervened. His argument is based on the following 'evidence';

• If you search for CSCO (Cisco's stockmarket ticker), a Google Finance result will be at the top of the page.
• If you add a comma to the query (i.e. CSCO,) the results remain exactly the same but the Google Finance section vanishes.

Mr Edelman claims that this evidence shows that Google may 'hard-code' links to their services.

Is it really evidence?

At first glance, this may seem like incontrovertible evidence against Google. However, if you take a programmers view on the matter it is anything but. A simplified search workflow would be;

1. User enters search term
2. Is it an address? if yes display Map
3. Is it a Stock Ticker? If yes display Finance
4. etc.
5. Display organic results

In the given example, we began by entering a valid stock ticker (CSCO) and then entered a string that, whilst similar, is not a valid stock ticker. Google's algorithm will not have found our exact string in their Finance database and so did not return a Google Finance section.

Organic search results don't limit the search to exact results. The system will display the most relevant results first, but if you work far enough through the results you'll find pages matched because your string appears in the middle of a word.

Bogus Claims

What Mr Edelman seems to be implying, is that Google have sat and manually configured a range of search queries to return their result at the top. In reality, this is highly unlikely. After all, there are simply millions of possible search parameters that could be entered.

Google's algorithm still appears to work on the basis of most relevant. If a search appears to be about an address, what could be more relevant that to display a map of the location?

If someone searches for a stock ticker, what could be more relevant than to display a graph detailing the stock's performance?

Anti-Competitive

Google have been criticised for using their dominant position to exclude competitors. Some have even compared it to the Microsoft Netscape situation. In reality, the two couldn't differ more. Microsoft deliberately took steps to bar Netscape from the market.

Are Google doing the same? No. Take a look at the CSCO search again, just above the graph you'll notice links to a lot of Google's competitors - Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, DailyFinance, CNN Money and Reuters.

Would you describe this as barring competitors? If so, what position does that put Bing and Yahoo in? Bing displays a similar graph but no links to competitors. Yahoo provides a link to either Yahoo Finance or Reuters.

If anything, Google seem to be allowing more competition that their competitors.

Why use competitors?

The issue appears to stem from the fact that fewer people are utilising competitors systems. But then, why would you need to? If you are looking for a quick appraisal of your stock, Google's results are more than sufficient for most.

Similarly, if Google Maps displays what you need, why would you go elsewhere?

There's a very very important fact that seems to get missed here. Many of these competitors charge for access to their system (or did before Google entered the market). If you can get a more accurate, less expensive service, why would you not?

Are there anti-trust issues?

Personally, I don't believe that there are. Google has a great many problems, especially in privacy related areas, but I don't think there's been any overt anti-competitive behaviour. If I'm honest, I think the words 'anti-trust ' are waved around far too easily by too many people.

The behaviour of IBM, AT&T and Microsoft have all been worthy of anti-trust action in the past. In todays world, those kind of behaviours just don't exist anymore. We need to establish firm boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable, until then any successful company is going to need to defend itself from anti-trust claims.

Punish Google for what they have done (such as intercepting Wi-Fi traffic) but don't try to force action where no wrong appears to have been done.

Google's stance

An interesting view of the software market can be gleaned from Google's response to Mr Edelmans 'smoking gun';

- Ben Edelman has been a paid consultant for Microsoft

You can read more on this story here.