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Supreme Court to Hear TikTok’s Challenge to Law That Could Ban It
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The company and its Chinese parent invoked the First Amendment in urging
the justices to step in before a Jan. 19 deadline to sell or be shut down.
40 minutes ago
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STATUS MATTERS, ...
The issue of search ranking is a touchy subject with Google, which says its algorithm is devised to give users the most useful result so they will come back. Google's revenue comes from advertising on the search results page.
Schmidt is also expected to try to steer the focus of the hearing to the company's running battles with those who game its search algorithm, for example "scrapers" who take commonly searched words, combine them into a nonsensical block of text and throw it up on the Web to grab eyeballs and advertising dollars.
Google believes that, if scrapers succeed too often, consumers will lose confidence in search and turn to other resources. There is thinking within Google that scrapers and others who try to game the search algorithm could pose an existential threat to the company.
Google has taken action in the past, penalizing Overstock.com Inc and J.C. Penney Co Inc after accusing them of abusing guidelines to get their websites to rank high in searches.
BEST-CASE IS STATUS QUO
The hearing carries risk for Google because the panel is looking at its most important product -- search, says Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Financial in New York.
"It's never a positive to have to testify on antitrust on the Hill," said Gillis. "The best-case scenario is that things continue as they are."
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