Texas Reveals Details of Google Probe

The Texas attorney general's office disclosed a set of demands it made last year seeking information from Google as part of an antitrust review that was triggered by complaints by small websites about how they were ranked in the Internet giant's search results.

In July of last year, Kim Van Winkle, an assistant attorney general in Texas, asked Google for a broad range of documents and names of employees who work on both algorithms that rank websites in search results as well as the company's search-advertising business, for which Google sells text ads that run alongside natural search results. The 13-page letter also asks for information or analysis that Google has about competition for advertisers with Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine, which recently began powering searches on Yahoo. The Texas letter asked about information and documents surrounding Google's specialized search feature for products such as digital cameras, which is now called Google Product Search. Texas asked how the company assigns a ranking to its specialized product-search service, and any documents that "describe, discuss or analyze the success, failure, traffic volume, or revenues associated" with that service. The Texas office also asked for documents pertaining to the websites that complained about Google, which are known as "vertical" search engines that help users search for products or other information in specific categories. Some of those sites could be viewed as competitors to Google's own product-search service, which often appears high up in search results.