Google Search Monopoly Appeal Legal Docs On Search Factors

"Google will suffer immediate and irreparable harm as a result of the transfer of this proprietary information to Google's competitors, and may additionally suffer irreparable financial and reputational harm should the data provided to competitors be leaked or hacked."

"The details Google would have to give competitors include: a unique identifier ("DocID") of each document (i.e., URL) in Google's Web Search Index and information sufficient to identify duplicates; "a DocID to URL map"; and "for each Doc ID, the (A) time that the URL was first seen, (B) time that the URL was last crawled, (C) spam score, and (D) device-type flag.""

"Google thinks handing this over will: (1) Give its competitors an unfair advantage because Google spent dozens of years working on these methods. (2) It would give away which URLs Google thinks are more important than others. (3) It would allow spammers to reverse engineer some of its algorithms. (4) It will make private information from searchers available to its competitors. Google wrote: First, Google's crawling technology processes webpages on the open web, relying on proprietary page quality and freshness signals to focus on webpages most likely to serve users' information needs. Second, Google marks up crawled webpages with proprietar"

Google opposes required disclosures and syndication that would transfer proprietary search-index identifiers, DocID-to-URL mappings, crawl timestamps, spam scores, and device-type flags to competitors. Google contends that sharing these data would give competitors an unfair advantage by revealing decades of proprietary methods and signals, expose which URLs Google ranks as more important, enable spammers to reverse-engineer ranking and spam-detection techniques, and risk leaking private searcher information. Google asserts that its crawling and markup processes rely on proprietary page-quality and freshness signals and that disclosure of those signals and mappings would cause immediate, irreparable competitive and reputational harm.

Read at Search Engine Roundtable