The Federal Trade Commission is reportedly expanding its antitrust probe of Google to include the company’s new “Search, plus your world” social-search feature, an effort to make users’ results more personal.
Bloomberg and Reuters both said Jan. 13 that the FTC is looking into the matter because it is concerned Google is providing preference to Google+ over Web services from others, breaking its promise to provide unbiased search results.
Search, plus your world injects posts and pictures from users’ Google+ accounts into their search results. It also makes users’ Google+ contacts and relevant Google+ Pages more readily searchable.
However, the service eschews such content from Facebook and Twitter, two of the world’s leading social services that users have come to expect content from on search engines. Google’s failure to treat third-party sources equal to Google+ in search results drew complaints from the media, Twitter and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).