Hello, friends,
Twenty-three years ago, the Clinton administration declared that the government should not interfere with the commercialization of the internet and that its development should be “market driven.” Today, the tide has clearly turned.
This week, the chief executives of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple faced nearly six hours of aggressive questioning by lawmakers on the House of Representatives’ antitrust subcommittee. It was the first time that all four CEOs have appeared together—and the first appearance by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos before Congress. One thing was clear: Policy makers’ unconditional love affair with Big Tech is over.
Both Democrats and Republicans were out for blood. Republicans accused the tech giants of suppressing conservatives voices. And Democrats demanded answers about how the tech giants wield their power to harm competitors.
The combative questions suggest that the committee is likely to call for serious regulations when it issues a long-awaited report, which it has described as a “top-to-bottom review of the market power held by giant tech platforms.”
There are many reasons that the tide has turned, but rigorous tech journalism has clearly been a factor. Lawmakers repeatedly cited evidence provided by journalists of tech platforms violating privacy, enabling election interference, and crushing competition.
As a brand-new newsroom, we were thrilled that Rep. David N. Cicilline, chair of the antitrust subcommittee, took Google CEO Sundar Pichai to task regarding The Markup’s report that Google Search places its own products and results above competitors’.
“An investigative report published just yesterday found that 63 percent of searches that start on Google also end on Google’s own websites,” Cicilline said, referring to our findings about results on the coveted first screen of search results. “And to me that is evidence that Google is increasingly a walled garden which keeps users on Google’s sites, even if Google doesn’t have the most relevant information. And it’s economically catastrophic for other companies online.”
Pichai said Google prioritizes providing users with the most relevant information to queries, and that ads appear on a small number of searches.
Our investigation, by investigative reporter Adrianne Jeffries and investigative data journalist Leon Yin, was a behemoth. Ten months in the making, it involved writing custom software to scrape the search results for more than 15,000 queries and then developing a novel technique that we call “web assay” to analyze the elements on the search result pages.
Anecdotally, many have noticed that their Google search results increasingly contained links to Google’s own content, or answers boxes that contained content scraped from other websites. But until we devoted the resources to analyzing the question, there was no systemic measurement of how much Google refers to itself in search results.
Specifically we found:
- Google results took up 62.6 percent of the first screen of search results in our sample.
- Google results took up 41 percent of the entire first page of search results in our sample.
- Even when they did appear, non-Google results were pushed down to the middle and lower-middle of the search results page.
- In more than half of the searches in our sample, Google content took up at least 75 percent of the first screen.
- In one out of five searches, non-Google content was entirely absent from the first screen.
- We examined other possible ways to categorize Google vs. non-Google results, and in every option we examined, Google still gave itself the most space on the first screen of search results.
Other tech sites say that Google’s decision to place its products above competitors’ has hurt both innovative startups and companies that have been around for a decade or more. The founder of travel website Hipmunk told us that he blames its death in part on Google Search’s high ranking of Google’s own travel products. Brian Warner, founder of the website CelebrityNetWorth, said his traffic crumbled and he had to lay off half of his staff after Google started showing information from his site in its “featured snippets” results—negating any need to click on the site itself.
In response to our findings, Google said that our sample was not random and therefore could contain more Google results than other search results. Google does not make any random samples available to the public.
Google also said that providing related searches and quick facts are “fundamentally in the interest of users” and not designed to preference Google itself.
Our findings go to the heart of the question that Congress is considering: Does Big Tech abuse its monopoly power? And if so, what can be done about it?
In his closing comments at the hearing, Cicilline previewed his committee’s likely answer: “This hearing has made one fact clear to me—these companies as they exist today have monopoly power,” he said. “Some need to be broken up; all need to be properly regulated and held accountable.”
What exactly that will look like remains to be seen. While the antitrust debate rages on, we will continue to collect and analyze data about how tech is impacting our lives.
As always, thanks for reading.
Best,
Julia Angwin
Editor-in-Chief
The Markup