I think your comment should have a disclaimer that you work for Google. But, to address what you said, the point being made is that if someone say made a clone

I think your comment should have a disclaimer that you work for Google. But, to address what you said, the point being made is that if someone say made a clone of Google, that had better search results than Google, that Google would penalize the website, as Google penalizes websites that resemble itself. This seems inherently anti-competitive, no? Consumers would be overjoyed to find that a new website existed out there that gave better results than Google for anything they might be looking for, yet they would never find out about the existence of such a website, as Google would suppress it in its results. This may be purely innocent intention—based in an understanding that users want results immediately instead of entering another engine or aggregator, but it's not completely apparent that is indeed the case. I was completely neutral (or as neutral as one can be, foremost concerned with ascertaining truth) at the end of the last sentence, so I decided to investigate a little myself. The results seem to me like Google isn't doing anything obviously of egregiously wrong from a first pass, though obviously I don't have the benefit of the 1.7b queries the EU had in their investigation. I searched, "price comparison website" and was presented first with this link: https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-shopping-engines-to-increase-ecommerce-sales https://www.shopify.com/blog/7068398-10-best-comparison-shop... I then searched for the name of each of the companies I didn't recognize. As I actually searched for Pronto first, I thought this verified Foundem's claims, but I think that Pronto didn't come up as it's a Brazilian site, as then when I searched for all the other sites they came up as the first result, except Become, which was on the first page but further down (presumably because it's such a common word). Nextag (dead) [1] PriceGrabber (first link on SERP) Shopzilla (first link on SERP) Become (bottom of first page) Pronto (not on the first ten pages) Bizrate (first result on SERP) So, you can clearly find these websites if you're looking for them. For Google to not directly link aggregate pages instead of direct results could very well be in the best interest of users... but the point at the end of the article stands that the sterility created in the overall tech ecosystem by such dominance may be harming consumers overall in the long term. It's unclear to what degree that's the case, though, if it is ultimately true. [1] WSJ piece from Nextag CEO 2012 https://outline.com/n8rW7a https://outline.com/n8rW7a They shutdown last year.