Google contradicts own counsel in face of antitrust probe

[Jack]

Google has admitted that it uses whitelists to manually override its search algorithms, more than a year after its European corporate counsel denied the existence of whitelists when defending the company against antitrust complaints in the EU.

According to Search Engine Land, Matt Cutts – the head of Google's webspam team – told a Silicon Valley conference that Google uses "exception lists" that prevent certain algorithms from affecting certain sites. There is no global whitelist, Cutts said, but for some algorithms, Google will make an exception for sites it believes have been wrongly demoted on its search pages.

Last February, when the world learned that EU antitrust regulators were investigating claims that Google unfairly manipulated its search results at the expense of competitors, Google European corporate counsel Julia Holtz told journalists in Brussels that the company doesn't "whitelist or blacklist anyone,” according to The Financial Times. And as late as December, Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich told The Register that the company did not use whitelists.

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[Watasha]

People will continue to turn a blind eye to this sort of thing from Google. They are never held accountable for anything.