Were Google's Practices Anti-Competitive or Just Anti-Competitor?

In the late nineties, even before Google's executives publicly pledged not to be evil, they were positioning their company's search engine as a meritocratic alternative to the main options at the time. Other search tools based their results on factors like how often a searched-for term appeared on a Web page, but Google went beyond this, ranking pages based on their importance. The company's engineers prided themselves on developing algorithms that, when presented with a search term, provided a ...