I read an article on Business Insider earlier today, titled “Here’s The Evidence That Google’s Search Results Are Horribly Biased.” And I immediately thought to myself, “Of course they are, why wouldn’t they be?”

The argument brought up by Yelp and Tripadvisor is that Google is putting their “Google Review” results on top of other sites that have significantly more reviews. This skews the results, as shown in a few screenshots in the article, which makes businesses with Google Reviews appear over others that are not partnered with Google.

Yelp and Tripadvisor believe that this is not fair because users should see the top reviewed businesses, and have an accurate representation of what they are like, instead of being forced to see what Google wants them to see. I personally think that what Google is doing is perfectly fine. They are company, like many others, that wants to make money. And how do they do this? Through ad revenue. The businesses that believe they need reviews to attract new customers, will have to pay Google to display their results on top of other free alternatives.

From a business perspective, this all makes sense. And that’s all Google is – a business. They provide their service for everybody to use-for free-and if they want to push the websites that paid them over websites that haven’t, I say go right ahead.