Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, testified Tuesday in a trial in which the company is accused of monopolizing the search market, suggesting that Google is indeed using its dominant position to bolster its own services.
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Judge Amit Mehta, who is presiding over the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet’s Google, previously ruled that the search giant is a monopoly in online search. Now, in a three-week hearing, the court is considering possible measures to limit its influence in order to increase competition in the market.
Reed described to the court how the Google division handles requests for AI models to use its data. Since May 2024, Google has offered a grounding service on its Vertex AI platform to Google Cloud app developers. The service allows AI models to check Google web search results when generating a response to improve their accuracy. More than a dozen companies already use the service.
In response to questions from Justice Department lawyers, Reed acknowledged that there is a difference between what companies using the paid grounding service receive and what is available to Gemini as part of the Google ecosystem.
«“The web search results it provides are the same,” Reed said of Vertex AI, adding that Google “provides additional results” for Gemini — for example, search features like the Knowledge Graph, which shows relationships between entities, or OneBox, which provides instant answers to certain queries, such as sports scores or flight information.
The US Justice Department is seeking to force Google to share with other companies much of the data it collects to generate search results, which it says will help other AI players develop their own search indexes and informed responses.
Earlier in the proceedings, OpenAI said it had asked Google to grant it access to its search index in August last year, but was refused.
Reed argued in court that the Justice Department’s data-sharing proposal, which she called “broad and invasive,” would give competitors “a huge trove of data” that could be a potential target for hackers. She estimated that if the department’s proposal were adopted, Google would have to employ about 2,000 engineers to implement it.
Reed also criticized the Justice Department’s proposal to give websites more options to opt out of Google’s AI products. She said Google already offers websites some opt-out options, but the Justice Department’s proposal would be “difficult” to implement because the company doesn’t always use different models for each feature.