Antitrust Be Damned, Google Keeps Trying to Close Off the Open Web

Technology October 11, 2024 News Team

Losing a major antitrust case in which it was found to be operating an illegal monopoly over internet searches doesn’t seem to have slaked Google’s greed for more control over search results. Even as the Department of Justice suggests its search businesses may need to be broken up, the company is testing new ways to suck even more traffic and ad revenue away from small website owners.

First came AI overviews at the top of search results. Now, the company appears to be experimenting with a feature that appropriates content from chefs and online cookbooks and completely negates the need to visit their websites.

First reported by Search Engine Roundtable (which we encourage you to click through to), the new “Quick View” feature is a button that appears for some Google users on the recipe images in search results. Clicking on it delivers the ingredient list and directions for the recipe from the publisher’s website packaged in a neat little window that keeps the user on Google’s website.

“Here Google is not giving you a snippet of information, encouraging the searcher to click over to the publishers site,” wrote Barry Schwartz, of Search Engine Roundtable. “Instead, Google is serving you the whole toolkit right on a silver platter.”

It was not immediately clear how widely the new “Quick View” feature is being tested.

“We’re always experimenting with different ways to connect our users with high-quality and helpful information,” Google spokesperson Brianna Duff wrote in an email. “We have partnered with a limited number of creators to begin to explore new recipe experiences on Search that are both helpful for users and drive value to the web ecosystem. We don’t have anything to announce right now.” Duff added that for this limited trial of Quick View, Google has “agreements in place with the participating recipe creators.”

It’s interesting timing for Google to be looking for new ways to keep users on its domain, given the angry noises coming from Washington.

In a Tuesday court filing in which it discussed strategies for dismantling Google’s search monopoly, the Department of Justice said it’s considering “requiring Google to allow websites crawled for Google search to opt out of training or appearing in any Google-owned artificial-intelligence product or feature on Google search.”

The language seems targeted at Google’s AI Overview feature, which summarizes (often poorly) the content on other websites. But it would likely also apply to a feature like Quick View that scoops up entire sections of content and repackages it at the top of search results.

In addition to the DOJ’s scrutiny, a group of Democratic senators has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the way Google misappropriates content from website owners and how those practices enrich the tech giant by steering traffic and ad revenue away from smaller publishers. In their letter to the FTC, the senators specifically referenced how this would harm recipe websites.

“If a user searches for a recipe, a search engine would have previously directed the user to a content-creator’s website,” they wrote. “But today, many generative AI features will instead copy information from those websites (without authorization) and present it as an AI-generated recipe directly to the user, in direct competition with those websites.”

The only way for the recipe publisher to avoid having their content stolen by Google would be to opt out of being indexed by the web’s most powerful gatekeeper, “which would result in a materially significant drop in referral traffic,” they wrote.

It has become an internet trope to complain about the long stories and philosophical musings that precede the instructions on many recipe websites, but if Google’s solution is to keep traffic away from those websites there might not be any more recipes to scroll down to. We’ll be left alone in the kitchen with Google and its step-by-step instructions for botulism or pizza covered in glue.

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