Google’s original “don’t be evil” mantra has once again proved to be worth nothing more than keyboard it was typed on with news that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found in 2012 that Google was intentionally manipulating its search results to discriminate against competitors.

The revelation came via The Wall Street Journal, which reports that as part of a broader FTC report into the company, it found that Google had “manipulated search results to favor its own services over rivals, even when they weren’t most relevant for users.”

The report explains that staffers in the FTC’s Bureau of Competition found evidence that Google boosted its own services for shopping, travel and local businesses by altering its ranking criteria and, perhaps even more disturbingly, scraped content from other sites, as well deliberately demoting rivals.

More damning was the following:

The FTC staff noted that Google presented results from its flight-search tool ahead of other travel sites, even though Google offered fewer flight options.

But wait, there’s more, with the report finding that Google’s shopping results were ranked above rival comparison-shopping engines, even where it was proved that users didn’t click on them at the same rate; you did read that that right, Google was pushing its own services even when it knew that they weren’t the results that its own users, its alleged raison d’etre for existing, wanted.

A gross breach of trust

In an age where “to Google” is an adjective to describe searching the Internet, finding that Google, despite the best protests from Head of Search Matt Cutts over and over again that they would never do such a thing, is nothing more than a gross breach of trust.

For Google’s part, it’s simply saying that no action was taken so they’ve done nothing wrong, a cop-out if there was ever one.

“After an exhaustive 19-month review, covering nine million pages of documents and many hours of testimony, the FTC staff and all five FTC Commissioners agreed that there was no need to take action on how we rank and display search results,” Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in a statement.

“We regularly change our search algorithms and make over 500 changes a year to help our users get the information they want,” he added. “We created search for users, not websites — and that focus has driven our improvements over the last decade.”

Many a Google user will be saddened to read the findings of the FTC report, and the fact that they were lied to and weren’t always given the best search results.

But likewise, realistically, it’s not as though millions are going to flock to Bing or Yahoo after reading this news; neither offers a superior service, and many will be so engrossed in Google’s ecosystem that it would be near impossible for them to change if they wanted to.

It could be well summed up as disappointing more than anything, and yet again another chink in Google’s don’t be evil mantra.

Image credit: Reddit