Last year, the FTC started their antitrust investigation of Google. Since then, the company has launched their social network, Google+ and just recently changes to search where Google+ is highlighted.
This has sparked more concerns and the FTC is said to be adding the social network to it’s investigation of possible antitrust practices.
Via Businessweek:
“The competition issues raised by Google+ go to the heart of the FTC’s investigation into whether the company is giving preference to its own services and whether that practice violates antitrust laws, said the people, who declined to be identified because the investigation isn’t public.”
Being that Google is such a large and powerful company, it’s no surprise they’re being investigated. They get Billions of searches every month and there’s massive amounts of data that they knowingly have access to.
No evidence of wrong doing has been found as of yet and the investigation is still ongoing. Many people are saying that they’re favoring Google+ in search while it’s public knowledge that Twitter decided to not renew a social search deal and Facebook didn’t want anything to do with it.
Social search is essentially search that pulls in information from social networks or at the current point in time, Google+ .
“Adam Kovacevich, a Google spokesman, said in an e-mail, “the laws are designed to help consumers benefit from innovation, not to help competitors. We believe that our improvements to search will benefit consumers.”
Now, if Twitter decides to be put back in social search again and a deal can be made, this would definitely take some of the heat off of Google. Currently there’s no talks about that however.
