I going to quote Steven, haven’t seen it this well said ever:

“Google not only stifles competition, it works to control every vertical it can. Google does not compete. Google controls.”

Welcome to Corporate Capitalism.

Isn’t that a hoot. The low-lifes in congress calling the kettle black. Congress has done more to damage the free market than any company could ever do.

I can both ways on this.
I think Google’s quality score pricing is fair. In many markets (long tail) makes it easier for smaller players to compete on quality, rather than just having big players come along and monopolize traffic by paying big bucks. It’s not a true eBay style auction, and I think that has many benefits to those who put in the time.

However, I struggle with all of the rules that Google forces on me. I run my business differently because of Google. Google acts as though it knows my business better than I do, but it does not. I have walked away from entering new markets because of the cost and length of time it takes for Google to recognize me.

Frankly I get MUCH better CPA on Bing ($3.50 compared to $50 on certain products), but the lower traffic means I can’t make a living off of Bing alone. I wish I could.

We have all given Google way too much power.

Yes I think Google has become anti-competitive and is no longer just a search company.

When they started Google stated their goal was to provide the best search results based on useful sites. And to do no evil

Now they seem to be angling towards providing the best shopping results.

And also the fact that they have things such as Google checkout to me are incompatible with a search engine.

They need to eb split up into a search company and the rest.

Digby

Google wasn’t always the 800 pound garilla and now that they are, the government is trying to “protect” the consumer. You would think they learned their lession 30 years ago when they broke up Ma Bell. What is the incentive for business to grow and become successful if at the end of their path Uncle Sam stands in their way and says you have become too big (successful). Let the market decide if Google is too big. The last time I checked, this is a free market and anyone is free to build a better mouse trap.

I have to be 50/50 on this. I do believe Google is getting greedier. In our analytics they now have the “Not Provided” for search terms, saying it’s to protect privacy, YET they will provide the info if it’s through Adwords, their paid advertising. And their use of Google+ to try and push down facebook and increase their revenue is a bit nasty, but I’m so sick of Facebook it’s not funny. If anything needs to be knocked down it’s Facebook.
On the other side, some of the new changes this year needed to be done. To many sites were passing page rank and manipulating the results to get on top of better businesses. Every other person claimed to be a “SEO Expert” and hopefully some of the changes will cut down on all of the spam comments on blogs, and such. If you manage dozens of sites for companies, the time it takes to maintain the spam on them is too much.
All in all, I’m not overly enthused about Google’s moves this year. Most of their employees share this thought from what I understand.

I used to get tons of traffic from froogle and Google Base in its early stages. My products were very relevant to the search keywords and I’ve always had the lowest prices. Sometime later Google Product search displays results from big companies at the top, my products have more relevant name and description but I don’t get nowhere near top results anymore.

You guys always get it all wrong. The problem is not whether Google is so big that other search engines can’t compete with them. The problem is Google using his dominance to rearrange search results to their benefit killing thousands of competitors (not only search engines), e-commerce sites.

Yes, search needs to be regulated like a public utility. Google is abusive. They deindexed my site after 12 years of enjoying perfectly good rankings. It was a huge product site so I was their competitor. I can’t do anything about it. They don’t respond. The abuse and silly algo. changes needs to stop. The government needs to regulate Google and search heavily.

Maybe the Senators are worried that if they don’t try to sneak in government censoring of the internet with sham legislation such as this, then the American public is going to be outraged when they find out what their government has done (such as murdering 1.6 million children in Iraq and Afghanistan). People at Google don’t do things like that. But Senators do.

Is Google anti-competition? I don’t know why any body could ask such question in the first place when everything is obvious. Why would videos posted on Youtube pop to the first pages after just a day or two? Why would a post on Blogger out rank posts from other blogging platforms?

From the documents posted above. Even Google’s CEO admitted. What else do we need?

I repeat as I said in one of the previous comments. “We may be looking at an internet dictatorship here”. I will add internet monopoly.

The problem isn’t Google so much as the environment in which they work. If we didn’t have millions of common sense domain names parked outside of the system Google would have a much better chance of providing usable first page search result matches. As it is, PR shouldn’t be a pyramid with 90% of sites shoved down into PR1 and PR0. PR10 should be the top 10% and so on. Here at http://www.smartsearchdirect.com we provide alternative search methods along side Google. If Google were to be forced to do anything, I’d like to see them required to provide search results to other search provider leach friends like they used to before cutting everyone off, same for Bing.

Google controls. WalMart controls. Amazon controls. And what would they have to control if not the control that you as the user give them. It is called a free market because you are free to make the choice. Humans are volitional beings.

All this stupid banter about companies doing excellent at what they do and then being punished is a load of garbage. I suppose you’d rather that _____ (insert large company) should just dish out their ideas, cash and effort in some altruistic gesture to make everyone the same. You do realize that the sum of a room full of zeros is still zero, don’t you?

If you, Mr. Whiner, have a business and you do it well, so well that the world in general loves your product/service and they exchange their time and money for your service on such a grand scale that it makes you wealthy…should you hope to be broken by the government for it? You are a person who sells a product that men need to men who are willing and able to buy it. You don’t sacrifice your interests to them nor do they sacrifice their interests to you. You deal as equals my mutual consent to mutual advantage. If I were Google I’d be damn proud of every penny that I earned in that manner and would refuse to apologize for my ability.

As my dad always told me, you can crap in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills up first.