Google Search: Regulation Yields to Innovation

[Commentary] Early this year, the Federal Trade Commission made the surprise decision not to bring an antitrust case against Google for its globally dominant search engine. Recently, Google announced the biggest change in how search works in more than a decade. The two events are not unconnected.

No regulators had to review or bless Google's relaunch of its search engine, which handles two-thirds of all searches. This innovation would not have been possible if Google were in the middle of a massive antitrust case -- as it almost was. There are winners in the new Google approach to search, but there are losers too, and they would have leaned on regulators to block change. Companies and marketing consultants that perfected search-engine optimization by focusing on which keywords to buy, for example, now must broaden their work to cover the context as well as the content of a search. Other companies suffer from Google's semantic search when it delivers results that answer searches directly, cutting out links to other sites.