“This was an incredibly thorough and careful investigation by the Commission, and the outcome is a strong and enforceable set of agreements,” Federal Trade Commission chair Jon Leibowitz said this afternoon. “Even though people would like us to bring a big search bias case, the facts aren’t there.”
The FTC went on to say they “scoured” 9 million pages of documents and took sworn testimony from “key Google executives” on the way to resolving its investigation in a “sensible” fashion, according to Reuters.
After all that work, and a bit of unnecessary hype, they decided that the search giant would end its practice of “scraping” reviews and other data from rivals’ websites for its own products, allowing advertisers to export data to independently evaluate advertising campaigns. Better luck next time, Bing.
