It’s good to be the King and in the world of search Google is the undisputed King.
That fact has made the tech giant something of a target however. Google has been sued repeatedly and investigated by both the US Congress and the EU’s General Court owing to its dominant position in the realm of search.
Many of the court cases the company is involved in hinge on the notion that Google is leveraging its dominant position to take unfair advantage. Recently the company has hit upon a novel way of defending itself.
A lawyer for Google presented evidence to the EU’s General Court that the most popular search term on the Bing search engine is, in fact “Google.” Thus, the company argues it has nothing to do with them unfairly leveraging their dominant position. The simple fact is that search engine users themselves are searching for Google because they simply prefer it.
Alfonso Lamadrid is one of the lawyers for Google’s parent company named Alphabet.
Lamadrid had this to say about the recent discovery:
“We have submitted evidence showing that the most common search query on Bing is by far Google. People use Google because they choose to, not because they are forced to. Google’s market share in general search is consistent with consumer surveys showing that 95 percent of users prefer Google to rival search engines.”
The company makes a compelling case that’s awfully hard to argue against. If users on a different search engine go out of their way to search for Google that’s got nothing to do with the company. Save for the fact that Google offers the superior product that the vast majority of end users prefer.
It remains to be seen how effective this line of reasoning will be before the court but it’s hard to see a flaw in the logic.
