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"Can Google and other search engines prioritize self-promoting results in search \u2014 and still enjoy constitutional protection under the First Amendment?\nYes, according to a report commissioned by Google from professor Eugene Volokh, an expert on constitutional and Internet law who teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. \nGoogle has quickly expanded outside the world of search over the past decade, now offering popular products in email, social networking, mapping and other services which often appear in search results on the site. Other search providers, such as Yahoo and Microsoft, also offer myriad other services that appear prominently in search results \u2014 for example, Bing Maps.\nGoogle denies prioritizing their own products in search results for an unfair business advantage, arguing they appear in search results because they're either the most relevant results or because they offer data relevant to a search query. Someone searching for an address, for example, would likely be interested in a map of that spot, says Google \u2014 so a Google Map gets embedded into search results.\nHowever, Volokh's report says that if they ever chose to actively prioritize their own products in search, the practice would fall well within the limits of constitutional protection.\n\"Even if it is assumed that Google engages or plans to engage in ... prioritizing, that prioritizing would constitute the legitimate exercise of Google's First Amendment right to decide how to present information in its speech to its users,\" Volokh wrote.\nSome Internet users fear that Google and other search outlets have been or are planning to modify their search algorithms to promote products owned by each respective company, despite the company's insistance of the opposite. Such users also worry that such tampering would lessen the value of search results. If results aren't delivered organically, they argue, how could they be trusted to be accurate? \nGoogle encountered blowback when it introduced \"Search Plus Your World,\" which adds information from Google+ to web search results.\nHowever, Volokh's report compared search results to the editorial decisions made every day at newspapers and magazines \u2014 choices granted First Amendment protection. \n\"Google, Microsoft\u2019s Bing, and Yahoo! Search exercise editorial judgment about what constitutes useful information and convey that information \u2014 which is to say, they speak to their users,\" wrote Volokh. \n\"In this respect, they are analogous to newspapers and book publishers that convey a wide range of information from news stories and selected columns by outside contributors to stock listings, movie listings, bestseller lists and restaurant guides.\"\n\nSEE ALSO: Google Probe: Meet the FTC\u2019s Secret Weapon\nGoogle is currently under an antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission on exactly this subject. The company has denied any wrongdoing. \n\"We use data sources that are our own because we can't engineer it any other way,\" Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt told the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. \"I disagree with the characterization that somehow we were discriminating against [competitors].\"\nSchmidt also pointed out that if Google users were unhappy with search results, it would drive them to use competing products, costing the company business.\n\"While we understand that there is no objective right answer to most search queries and that the answer is a 'scientific opinion,' we also recognize that if we do not give users the best possible search results, they are likely to click away to one of our competitors,\" he said.\nDo search results deserve First Amendment protection? Can a report on the subject commissioned by Google be trusted? Sound off in the comments, and read the full report here:\nGoogle First Amendment Report"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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