Google clarify their position on new updates on their search engine

Google has been facing intense criticism for the recent changes made on their search engine. The company has been criticized for promoting more of their own services on the search result pages. Google Plus integration with Google Search was one of the biggest controversies of recent times. And the recent Google Shopping update is also not helping the cause.

Google’s Senior Vice President, Engineering Amit Singhal has responded to some of these criticisms in a blog post. He specifically replies to claims made by CEO of comparison shopping site Nextag in an article in Wall Street Journal. You can go through the post here.

His main points are:

Google optimize their search results for the benefit of their users and not web publishers.
Organic search results are never tempered with.
Sponsored content is always highlighted as such.
Knowledge graph and similar direct information is not unique to Google. Other search engines also have similar features.
Rival companies are free to use their advertising tools and a lot of them do already.
If the user thinks that Google is not being fair, there are plenty of alternatives they can use. Singhal points to popular rivals like Bing and Yahoo along with lesser known ones like DuckDuckGo and Google Minus Google. Blekko would be disappointed though.