Can Google Results Be Trusted Anymore?
On the heels of accusations that the management of Alphabet Inc’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google may have tilted some search results after the election of Donald Trump, and that the company might censor results to get more market share in China,…
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On the heels of accusations that the management of Alphabet Inc’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google may have tilted some search results after the election of Donald Trump, and that the company might censor results to get more market share in China, several employees went so far as to address the problem in internal email. Even if the accusations are not true, they have to taint belief of Google’s objectivity in some quarters.
After the revelation of the China charges, some Google employees put together a code of ethics. It suggested that search results be monitored by Google employees, a “plan for transparency” in search results, and, most radically, the ability to opt out of work employees find ethically compromising.
Management, in particular CEO Sundar Pichai, has aggressively denied that Google’s results are ever slanted at all. However, press reports about the tensions have made them part of a huge public debate about the search engine’s future.
Google management may be able to make the case that results were not slanted because of bias against decisions made by Trump. The China results issue is more complicated. China has the largest online population in the world with estimates as high as 775 million. Google has been almost entirely blocked out of the China. Local search company Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU) has over three quarters of the market, and has been in that position for years.
Google was not always an outcast in China. It had over a third of the market prior to 2009. Google refused to censor results as the Chinese government demanded. It effectively abandoned the market in 2010, which potential cost it billions of dollars going forward.
The draw of the Chinese market may be too much for Google to resist. That leaves the chance that via some level of negotiation it will meet the Chinese government in a compromise. Even if Google only gives a little, it may ruin its reputation.
News and rumor that Google would alter its search results at all, for any reason, make the ability of the public to trust results fall precipitously.
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
