People in Germany use Google every day because it is helpful for them when it matters.

You use Google search to get relevant and trustworthy results, about the opening times of shops in Munich, the way to your vaccination center in Hamburg and millions of other small and large questions.

Every day, people in Germany naturally also use other apps and websites to find information, book flights and compare products.

Fortunately, the choice of information sources and services is unlimited.

People use Google because it's helpful, not because they're forced to, or because they can't find alternatives. It takes investment, creativity and relentless innovation to keep our products relevant and to work well. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have introduced more than 200 new features that help our users work even better from home, go to school digitally, stay in touch with family and friends and find relevant health information. These include free video conferences with Google Meet, or map details on Covid-19 case numbers in Google Maps or functions for digital school lessons in Google Classroom.

So it's true that Google's products look different now than they did a year ago or at a time when there were only "ten blue links" in Google search. We are convinced that this development is good for users and also good for companies across Germany that rely on our products.

Innovations in search are often controversial at the same time - companies in particular want their offers to appear at the top whenever possible. Of course, not all search results can be displayed simultaneously and equally prominently. Therefore, our focus is on delivering the most relevant results to users. If you are looking for a specific company, for example a restaurant or a shop, we will put you in touch. Both consumers and the many companies that appear in our results benefit from this. And it helps smaller businesses in particular to attract attention and customers.

It is important and useful to have a debate on these issues. Politicians, academics, regulators and the wider public sometimes have strong views about what should be relevant, and we welcome that. We too have brought our views on regulations such as the European law for digital markets (DMA) or German competition law (GWB) and how they will affect our users in the discussion. At the DMA, we have encouraged legislators to improve the text so that it leads to more innovation, more openness and more choice for European consumers.

When we enter the debate, we try to do so on the basis of facts in support of our arguments.

With this in mind, some statements in the recently published guest article “Google is so dominant in search” require a closer look.

We want to bring data and facts into the debate that cast some of the authors' concerns in a different light.

In particular, we would like to counter the view that we are artificially “manipulating” search results for our own financial gain, that innovations in Google search would lower the quality of our search results, and that we have increased the prices of digital advertising.

These claims are unfounded - and are in no way supported by data.