Google is being investigated by the UK competition watchdog over the impact of its search and advertising practices on consumers, news publishers, businesses and rival search engines. The CMA estimates that search advertising costs the equivalent of nearly 500 for each UK household a year, which could be kept down with effective competition. The watchdog announced on Tuesday it will investigate if Google is blocking competitors from entering the market, and whether it is engaging in "potential exploitative conduct" by the mass collection of consumers' data without informed consent. It will also investigate whether Google is using its position as the pre-eminent search engine to give an unfair advantage to its own shopping and travel services. The investigation will take up to nine months and could result in Google being forced to share the mountains of data it collects with other businesses, or to give publishers greater control over how their content – books, newspaper articles and music – is used, including by Google's fast-growing artificial intelligence systems.

The UK's competition watchdog has launched an investigation into Google to probe whether it has too much power in online search. Google accounts for 90% of UK web searches - the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is looking at whether it is using that dominant position to harm competition or choice for users. It is its first investigation after gaining new powers to investigate and enforce changes at firms it determines to have "strategic market status" in digital markets. The CMA says it wants to ensure the tech giant is "delivering good outcomes for people and businesses" and that there is a "level playing field" for rivals. In a statement Google said: "We will continue to engage constructively with the CMA to ensure that new rules benefit all types of websites, and still allow people in the UK to benefit from helpful and cutting edge services." It is the latest in a series of investigations Google faces worldwide over its immense power in search and advertising technology.

The United States Department of Justice's proposed remedies to break up Google's search dominance could weaken its main profit engine and stall its advances in artificial intelligence, even though a final outcome may be years away, analysts say. The Justice Department said on Tuesday it may ask a judge to force Google to divest parts of its business, such as its Chrome browser and Android operating system, that the Alphabet-owned company used to maintain an illegal monopoly in online search. It is only one of the many potential fixes prosecutors are considering. Barring Google from collecting sensitive user data, requiring it to make search results and indexes available to rivals, letting websites opt out of their content being used to train AI products and making Google report to a "court-appointed technical committee" are also on the table. The remedies strike at the heart of the internet empire that has made Google synonymous with search and can reduce its revenue while giving its rivals more room to grow.

Microsoft (MSFT) on Tuesday unveiled what could be the biggest threat to Google's (GOOG, GOOGL) search empire in years with the release of its new Bing search engine powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT technology. It's a new paradigm for search," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during an unveiling event held at Microsoft's Redmond, Washington campus. "Rapid innovation is going to come. A race starts today in terms of what you can expect. We are going to move fast." But Google controls 93% of the marketplace compared to Bing's 3%. So why bother starting a war? Simple: Microsoft wants a larger slice of the $570 billion digital advertising market. In 2022, the company saw $18 billion in ad revenue through search and LinkedIn. Google, meanwhile, pulled in $59 billion in Q4 alone. To that end, Microsoft has outfitted Bing with generative AI powered by a more advanced version of OpenAI's popular ChatGPT chat bot. One example of how this comes into practical use is by searching for whether a new LG ...

While Google Apps is making some big strides in selling to business customers, Microsoft Office is still the de facto standard in software for getting work done. But there's one thing that Google is, and has always been, better at than its rivals at Microsoft: Search. In fact, Google boasts, it's been providing search solutions to businesses for the last 15 years. "We're not new players by any means," says Google Director of Product Management Ryan Tabone. On Monday, Google is turning that expertise into a nifty new product with Springboard, a tool for its Google Apps for Works customers, that lets you search all your data across the whole suite of Google productivity tools.