Europe has slapped Google’s parent company Alphabet with a record $3.6 billion fine over the exclusionary practices of their shopping policies. Europe says they were manipulating search results that highlighted Google-client paid advertisers as opposed to those companies that didn’t pay Google, and that not what a search engine should do, they said. At a press conference, Margrethe Vestager, a member of the European Commission, said, “Google abused its market dominance as a search engine to promote its own comparison shopping service in the search results, whilst demoting those of rivals.”
Eric Jones is a marketing expert and doesn’t really have a problem with Google’s practice. “It’s their search engine so they should be able to do whatever they want with it,” he tells KTRH News. “They just need to be more open and honest about what is and isn’t an ad. Because if only people in the business can tell what is an ad and what isn’t that probably why Europe had a problem with it.”
When you search for an item you’re shopping for on Google you’ll see images of items. “Typically in search results they are placed at the top,” Jones says. Those are Google shopping selections, and though to the upper right of the pictures it reads, “Sponsored,” many people don’t notice. “So instead of actually going to a website from the search result, you can actually click and image of the product and go buy it from there,” he says. Sellers pay for that prime real estate.