Does Google favour its own products in search results?

I need to search an information, i remember Google. I trust google, hoping that it will give me the genuine search results. But sometimes even i had felt that Google might cook up its search results to favour its own products or the products of its own  valuable customers. This fuss is around my mind for a while. Does Google really cook up their search results ?. Who knows?. Well, “We don’t cook search results to favour our products“, the obvious answer from Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google Inc.

Eric Schmidt reported to U.S. Senate hearing looking into whether the leading search engine abuses its super power in the market.  On Wednesday the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel said that Google had grown into a super power in the Internet. “Google is in a position to determine who will succeed and who will fail on the Internet,” said Republican Senator Mike Lee. “In the words of the head of the Google’s search ranking team, Google is the biggest kingmaker on Earth.” Google has been blamed  of using its power in the internet to overcome rivals who moves into related businesses, like travel search.

Jeffrey Katz, the CEO of Nextag, an Internet comparison shopping company, said there is no doubt that Google was initially a huge boost in building innovation. “But what Google engineering giveth, Google marketing taketh away,” he said in written testimony. He added, “Google doesn’t play fair. Google rigs its results, biasing in favor of Google Shopping and against competitors like us,” Katz said in written testimony. “As a result, Nextag’s access is more and more discriminated against … because we compete with Google where it matters most, for very lucrative shopping users.” Katz and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman both said they would not start new businesses in the current environment. “I personally wouldn’t. I’d find something else to do,” said Stoppelman at the hearing.

Its really hard to imagine that there are lots of such blames on Google today!!. Does Google really to be blamed or not ?. It again ends with a question who knows?.