Every minute there are 3.8 million queries made on Google. For a site that’s become part of our daily lives, politicians are wondering if and how the internet giant should be regulated.
Dr. Eric Clemons, Wharton Management Professor and Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, and Kirsten Grind, a Financial Enterprise Reporter for the Wall Street Journal, spoke with Wharton Business Daily host Dan Loney about the ways Google controls what we see.
Interview Highlights
On Google’s Concentration of Power
“It’s hard to look at this and see how much market share Google has in Google Search and see how little transparency there is around it. It’s amazing to me that one company can have this much power.”
— Kirsten Grind
“Google argues that algorithms are king. But when it’s really profitable, the abuse is really profound.”
— Eric Clemons
On Transparency
“Google is filling in queries. Of course, it’s biased. It’s biased in usually exactly the way I want. It gives me big companies [in my search results] because I’m more likely to want to buy from them. And it is context-specific. There are things I get at the integration of different Google offerings that represent a payback to me.”
— Eric Clemons
“You just have to be more aware that what is being delivered to you from all tech platforms, not just Google, it is a set of decisions that are being made from behind the scenes… In autocomplete, you can really see how Google is trying to weed out these inflammatory suggestions. Now you could say, ‘What’s wrong with that?’ But the problem is it’s a slippery slope. If you’re weeding out some things, what are you not weeding out?
There are all these websites trying to get on the homepage of the Google search results because it drives an enormous amount of traffic to your business. So, for any company to get even a fraction of help from Google is massive. Most of the companies and websites see a huge website drop when Google makes an algorithm change. They’re basically put out of business.”
— Kirsten Grind
On Google’s Paid Results
“Google makes it clear that there’s no explicit relationship, but if you need to show up on organic search, you need paid search… Google argues that they never manipulate organic search results in the presence of paid results. That’s blatantly false. You would need a PhD in statistics to disentangle paid search from free search.”
— Eric Clemons
Posted: November 29, 2019
