Author: Mark Sanderson, Dean of Research and Professor of Information Retrieval, RMIT University

In his landmark ruling against Google earlier this week, United States district judge Amit Mehta said the tech giant has built “the industry’s highest quality search engine”. Judge Mehta made clear this was partly because Google had an illegal monopoly over the market. Nonetheless, Google was keen to promote the praise it received for its flagship product. Its president of global affairs, Kent Walker, said: This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available. But is the Google search engine as good as the company (and Judge…