Imagine there was an email from Larry Page to the search team along the lines of: "foobar.com is a fast growing vertical search engine that could be a huge comm

Imagine there was an email from Larry Page to the search team along the lines of: "foobar.com is a fast growing vertical search engine that could be a huge commercial threat to us. Remove them from the search results so that fewer people will find out about it". That'd look kind of bad to most people. Or maybe a PM boasted in his performance review that a change he pushed for in a search widget increased clicks to Google properties by 10% and reduced clicks to Yahoo ones by 30%. It's that kind of thing the FTC is hoping to find during discovery, even if they don't have a case right now. Of course they're not very likely to find that kind of stuff. More likely the hypothetical foobar.com fell down the rankings after a set of parameters were re-weighed using a ML algorithm and verified by having a bunch of human raters evaluate the search results before and after the change. The worst part is that to maximize the chances of success of fishing expeditions like this, the FTC would of course try to extend the discovery to as many areas as possible. Including completely absurd ones, like supposed anti-competitive patent abuse. And that's why any article that lists all the things they're "investigating" Google for is going to dilute the already weak case even further.