diberry - 2:25 pm on Oct 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

The earlier probe - where Schmidt testified before Congress - seemed to focus on stuff like Yelp suddenly falling in the SERPs *after* refusing to let Google Places continue to scrape their content. That this happened is not in question; it's they WHY of it. Google contends the algo just happened to do that, but Yelp contends it was deliberate and retaliatory, and it'll be on Google to disprove things like this.

The point about Adwords being a way for a spam site - or even a dodgy or illegal site - to get to #1 is a good one. Anti-trust suits are less about what the company has/hasn't done wrong and more about the best interests of consumers. That's why we have Congress people asking why Google can't just avoid indexing scam sites and illegal sites. It's not really reasonable to expect Google to know if every website is legit or not, but it is a consumer affairs problem so Google may well get held to some government imposed standard on this issue.