Texas Attorney General Investigates Antitrust Issues about Google

It looks like Google (News - Alert) can’t keep too many secrets. At least not in Texas. Bloomberg News broke a story this week that Texas Attorney General Gregg Abbott has requested lots of information from Google, including the classified formula for setting ad rates.

A team of Texas antitrust investigators is now seeking documents that show “manual overriding or altering of” search result rankings, according to legal documents read by Bloomberg (News - Alert). At issue is whether Google’s business practices hurt competition, the media reported.

The Texas attorney general’s office has also requested that Google provide info on shopping search and the ranking of Web sites in search results and ad listings, reports The New York Times.

The antitrust inquiry began in July and in September the public was made aware of if, The Times adds.

The request for the documents is similar to a subpoena, according to Bloomberg. It forces a company to turn over documents and make their executives available for interviews by the attorney general’s staff.

State investigators are also requesting Google documents on Bing and Yahoo, as well as complaints “about purchasing and placing an ad on Google,” Bloomberg reported.

Texas has asked, too, for documents assessing competition from other search engines, such as myTriggers, Foundem, TradeComet and SourceTool, The Times reports.

In addition, the office requested Google provide documents on the “strategy and ranking of links for several of Google’s e-commerce services, Froogle, Google Product Search and Google Shopping,” according to The Times.

The requests were listed in a 13-page letter from Kim Van Winkle, an assistant attorney general in Texas’s antitrust division, to Matthew Bye, who is a lawyer for Google. The Times added.

In the past, Google has been often reluctant to share information on its algorithms. There are other investigations into Google. For instance, European antitrust regulators are investigating whether Google discriminates against smaller companies in compiling its search results, according to a report on TMCnet.

As of earlier this month, Google and the European Commission were apparently trying to find a way to settle an antitrust investigation by European regulators regarding Google’s search practices, according to TMCnet.