Google – the only game in town

There was little surprise this week when the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that Google had unlawfully stolen reviews from sites like TripAdvisor and Amazon. They have been using unattributed reviews from other sites for years to bulk up their review content – particularly in the hard-to-crack local search area. Read more here on Skift.

What fewer people have commented is that when companies like TripAdvisor told the search giant to stop, Google said they could but it would also involve removing all reference to TripAdvisor in the Google search results. In other words – if TripAdvisor, Yelp and the other sites pressed Google, they would lose all their listings. To all intents and purposes they would cease to exist in search (apologies Bing).

Google is a brilliant search engine – but it can’t be healthy that it’s the only game in town.