In the world of search, Google reigns supreme and stands behind their informal corporate motto “don’t be evil.”  They claim to provide unbiased and objective results to the best of their ability.  But do they create an impartial Camelot like their motto suggests?  With all the talk surrounding the Google/Apple wars, we decided to investigate.

The Apple iPhone is popular, wildly popular.  Typing ‘iPhone’ into the major search engines yields:

Yahoo! Search – 1.6 billion results

Google – 356 million results

Bing – 802 million results

No doubt that in your work with SEO and PPC campaigns you’ve used, or come across Google AdWords.  I’ve used this program quite a bit and find the collection of tools especially helpful for suggesting potential keywords and providing traffic estimates for new projects.  So I was curious – how does the iPhone rate within the Google keyword tool?  Searching for phrases containing any of the terms ‘iPhone,’ ‘i-Phone,’ or ‘i Phone’ yielded 14 suggestions (Figure 1).  The tool is not case sensitive, I checked.  Only 14 different phrase suggestions containing the word iPhone or its common derivatives seems improbable, especially given the number of search results!  Interesting…

Figure 1: Google AdWords - keyword suggestions for 'iphone,' 'i-phone,' and 'i phone'

Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google and runs using a Linux platform.  In October 2008 HTC released the first commercial cell phone to use this operating system.  For comparison, the first Apple iPhone was released in June 2007.  Typing ‘android’ into the major search engines yields:

Yahoo! Search – 267 million results

Google – 40 million results

Bing – 4.8 million results

As expected, these search results for the term ‘android’ contain a lot of noise.

Using the same Google AdWords keyword tool I searched the term ‘android.’  The keyword tool found and suggested the maximum number of phrase match possibilities (Figure 2).  Included within the results were several expected phrases relating to robots and ‘killer androids,’ but the overwhelming majority of the results were clearly representing the Google Android operating system.

Figure 2: Google AdWords - keyword suggestions for 'android'

Comparing the results returned by the search engines, there’s more web content for the Apple iPhone in comparison to Google Android.  Google Trends also indicates this difference in terms of relative search volume (Figure 3).  Somehow the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool only comes up with 14 phrases that contain the term ‘iphone’ or its derivatives, yet maxes out when looking up its own product.  The phrases ‘iPhone app’ or ‘iPhone app’s’ were not identified, but ‘android app’ was – something doesn’t seem right…

Figure 3: Google Trends - 'iphone' vs. 'android'

Google’s proprietary algorithms are unknown to all but a few, so we cannot be sure why the above results occur.  Are we looking at a case of unintentional bias, or selective removal of Apple iPhone based terms?  Regardless, the Google/Apple war remains in full effect.