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Perhaps because of legal issues, particularly when Google is being sued for tweaking its ranking algorithm to boost their own pages higher.

I dont understand the legalities of that lawsuit though. A ranking is an opinion. Its not that its some fundamental physical constant or a formally well defined quantity. Can I be sued for my subjective judgment ?

OT: Will appreciate if you let me know why you down voted.

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I don't understand those lawsuits either. Isn't Google a private company? Aren't they entitled to do what they want with their product? I see no reason why their results must be "fair", legally.

Well, if they're actually a monopoly, then it does change what they can do, legally.

IANAL, but proving that a company has a monopoly and used that monopoly in an abusive way is very hard.

Consider that when discussing whether a company has a monopoly on a market, alternatives and cost of switching also comes up (besides market share); so it will be even harder than in the case of Microsoft.

Then even if Google is discovered to have a monopoly, shutting down a website ... can be argued that it was in the best interests of its users and faithful to the product's original mission: i.e. nobody can sue Microsoft for improving Windows / not bundling third-party software (they got sued for extending Windows with new functionality that destroyed competition in an existing market).

can be argued that it was in the best interests of its users and faithful to the product's original mission

If you're willing to pay the tens of millions of dollars and take the PR hit that is a government anti-trust lawsuit, you may eventually have the privilege of making that argument before a federal judge, who probably isn't technology literate enough to comprehend it. Let's face facts here, this conversation goes over the heads of 80% of internet users. The judge is going to see "the federal government accuses them of restraining this site's trade by removing them from the search index, and Google admits to it" and then that's the ballgame.

Or maybe the government never gets around to suing Google. Or maybe they get a judge who knows this sort of stuff already. But that's still a scenario keeping Google's Legal Dept. up at night.

Yeah, but that would be like suing Microsoft for making Windows more secure because that can "restrain the trade of companies producing Antiviruses".

That would be a pretty stupid argument, even in the face of a non-technical jury, wouldn't it?

Of course, the negative image would hurt, but lets be honest, the suit against Microsoft accomplished basically nothing it couldn't handle, while waisting taxpayer's money. Are these antitrust suits getting started so easily?

Or like suing Microsoft for making the computers that ship with its OS more useful by including Office cheaply...

I would be surprised to see them suffering for optimising the algorithm to try and trace the original source of content though. With the sort of sites we're talking about, by definition that original source will be more up-to-date content which the user could reasonably expect to be presented preferentially. At which point - you're welcome to make your business from rehosting public content that originates elsewhere, but if you expect us to primarily direct people to your copy rather than the original then I think you're onto a loser.

Let's put it another way. I could conceivably build a valuable service by taking content from StackOverflow and Wikipedia (or wherever) and automatically linking the two to enable people to get some more context around some questions, maybe reformatting pages to enable side-by-side content or something similar. It wouldn't be a trivial service but it wouldn't be impossible in the least and it could plausibly add value. As such it wouldn't be unreasonable to preferentially direct users in some cases to that source rather than the original, as algorithmically optimised content - the preferential ranking would be a result of the value of the linking algorithm. Without this though, by what measure am I conceivably superior to the original source by having an out-of-date copy with fewer legitimate inbound links and more irrelevant content (adverts)?

Being a monopoly isn't illegal. Using your monopoly power in a way that might harm another company isn't illegal. What's illegal is doing that unreasonably and capriciously, as Microsoft were with Netscape in that trial, or DR and Lotus in previous trials.

No law, as far as I am aware, forbids a monopoly from producing a crappy product. Antitrust law comes into play when a competitor offers a less-crappy product and the monopoly tries to drive the competitor out of business.

No, but a company that has a monopoly cannot manipulate a market by making a product selectively crappy, like a search engine that fails to find its competitors or a program that fails to run on a competing, compatible OS (early win3 on DR-DOS).

Yes, if you make your product selectively crappy in order to undermine competition, it’s an antitrust problem. Microsoft making Windows not run on DR-DOS is an antitrust problem. Microsoft making Windows fail at multiuser security is not an antitrust problem.

> Microsoft making Windows fail at multiuser security is not an antitrust problem.

No. That was incompetence.

It's a publicly traded company, but yes, "private" if you mean "not controlled by a government"