Google on Thursday mounted a renewed defence of the way it ranks search results, as fresh questions emerged about its practice of sometimes manually intervening to override its automated ranking system.
The company has been forced onto the defensive by the disclosure earlier this week of a preliminary anti-trust review from the European Commission. Brussels is looking into complaints from three companies that Google’s search rankings and its related advertising system treat some competitors unfairly.
In a blog posting on Thursday, Amit Singhal, a Google employee responsible for the ranking system, claimed that the company’s algorithms produced better quality and more relevant results than one based on human intervention, though he admitted the system was far from perfect.