Last week, I was reading The Huffington Post, and one of the articles I read was entitled “In Antitrust Battle Against Google, Smaller Rivals Say Web Giant Is ‘Trying To Kill Them'” by Bianca Bosker.
Google has been accused of cheating by manipulating search results to steer users to Google-owned sites and making it more unlikely that users will have reason to visit “third-party sites”.
Google responded by saying that it ranks search results to deliver the best answers to its users and that it does not take action to hurt specific websites for competitive reasons. Other CEOs and entrepreneurs have described Google as “big traffic generator”. These CEOs and entrepreneurs also said that they’ve benefited from Google launching products that would compete with their own.
I don’t necessarily agree with those who are accusing Google of having anticompetitive behavior and manipulating the search results; however, I am biased because I blog via Blogger, which is owned by Google. Like some of the entrepreneurs have said, Google has been a huge contributor to the traffic to NIA SPEAKS. Thanks, Google!
But still…I can see why some people question whether or not the corporation is trying to become a monopoly. Google plays a significant role in the Internet world. I mean, the word “google” has been added as an informal verb to the dictionaries! Seriously. There’s a plethora of information I probably wouldn’t know if it wasn’t for Google. It’s the “main street” of the Internet, and it would be naïve for me to say otherwise. Almost all of the “real estate” of the Internet has been taken over by the corporation. Google powers two-thirds of all searches in the United States of America and claims three-fourths of all search ad-revenues.
I’ve been interested in Google’s size, success, and effects on competing companies such as Bing, Yahoo, or Ask for a little while now, and this article has shown me that not everyone sees the company’s dominance in a positive light.
What do you think? Do you think Google is too big?
Thanks for reading!
Majority of this information taken from huffingtonpost.com
Picture citation: google.com
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