Comment by Nextgrid
2 years ago
Intentionally ranking sites with Google ads higher would be a huge antitrust liability, so no way they're doing that.
On the other hand, they can achieve virtually the same outcome while keeping plausible deniability by just not doing anything that would downrank sites with ads (of which a significant chunk is likely to be Google's).
Spam sites often include ads.
i dont think they public disclose that fact
It doesn't need to be public to become an antitrust liability. Internal written material can still come up during discovery, potentially even in unrelated cases.
Therefore the safest option is to never openly discuss it or intentionally do it and instead use other means to achieve the objective (don't intentionally rank spam higher, just defund/cancel any projects that would make it rank lower).
> Internal written material can still come up during discovery, potentially even in unrelated cases.
Yup, and I think we've seen how careless and thoughtless Google is, as an organization, with internal comms in the Epic case. It would be shocking if it hadn't been discovered in that, or a prior, lawsuit.