Google has just recently fined two French companies over advertising abuses. This comes as no surprise seeing how Google is the dominant search engine in the world today. Google’s current reputation is spot on: they are always looking out for new ways to make their search engine experience better. As such, they do not mind partnering with companies that want to promote their goods and services globally.
Google France was working with a company called Click2 Dialog. This company was promoting a product called Click2 Dialog. The problem happened when the company realized that many people were using this service for phishing purposes, which then resulted in Google removing the product off the search engine rankings. Google has now decided to enforce their existing policies and will not tolerate any sort of phishing attempts while using the search engine.
The other company that was abused was called Getresponse. They too had been offering a service called GetResponse. They decided to partner with Google in an effort to get more Google AdSense clicks, but ultimately the end result of this was Google cutting their connection with GetResponse. The company had to close their doors while hoping that Google would still promote their products.
Both companies lost a considerable amount of money, however, Google released them both from their contracts with out restrictions. However, this isn’t good news for the average searcher out there. It means that you may have gotten a great search engine tool, but your results are probably not as relevant to your particular needs as those of the other company. That means that you are probably going to miss out on some legitimate links and ads, as well as the chance to make some extra cash. This can be detrimental to those who use the search engine to find information about what they need, instead of just picking something out at random.
This isn’t the only time that Google has gotten into a contract with a search engine. In 2021 they were heavily fined by the European Union for censoring information about certain websites. This included one search engine that Google worked very hard to get listed in. Other companies like Yahoo have also had their accounts blocked from the search engine because of various problems. This all proves that Google needs to be more watchful of its relationship with the search engines.
Google’s reputation is at risk because it is too big to fail. Right now it is the largest search engine, but it isn’t hard to imagine them falling behind in the next few years. There are hundreds of millions of searches performed every day, and Google doesn’t make a profit unless people use their services. If they start blocking their partners or worse yet, start to censor the search results that their partners will get, then they could be headed towards oblivion.