• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, April 13, 2006

As Google increasingly launches portal-like content, will the company's own pages feature prominently in the results? The answer, apparently, is yes.

A new report by Merrill Lynch examines results pages that include links to Google's own content, and concludes that such links constitute a potential conflict of interest.

For instance, a search for "finance" returns Yahoo's finance page, finance.yahoo.com, as the first organic result. But the top sponsored result is Google's own finance page--launched last month.

"The promotion of Google Finance over paid advertiser links could be construed in our opinion as unfair to advertisers that want the #1 paid position," wrote research analyst Justin Post in the report.

Additionally, Google recently started incorporating Google Base--its classified service in all but name--into the organic results. Not only does this feature potentially dilute the organic listings on the page, it also further threatens newspapers and other publishers that rely on paid classifieds. Of course, some of those newspapers/publishers distribute Google ads through Adsense.

Post also states that Merrill Lynch isn't yet aware of any advertiser push-back. But surely it's only a matter of time until marketers resent Google's own listings--or listings of Google partners, like AOL--taking up valuable real estate in the results page.

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