Google insisted its practices were legal under fair-use (Creative Commons)

The Federal Trade Commission ended a 19-month investigation of Google's business practices on Thursday, where it had suspected Google of "abusing its dominance in Internet search," reported CBS News:

• Google's rivals say the company has been highlighting its own services on its influential results page while burying the links to competing sites.
• Google Inc. has fiercely defended its right to recommend the websites that it believes are the most relevant.
• The FTC said it voted unanimously to close the investigation on whether Google's algorithm unfairly favored itself because there was no evidence that Google violated antitrust laws.
• "Although some evidence suggested that Google was trying to eliminate competition, Google's primary reason for changing the look and feel of its search results to highlight its own products was to improve the user experience," FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz said to reporters Thursday.

The investigation had included 9 million pages of sworn testimony by Google executives. According to CBS, regulators say Google has promised to "exclude snippets copied from other websites in its summaries of key information, even though the company had insisted the practice is legal under the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law."

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