Home > News

Employees Say Amazon Tweaked Search Algorithm to Favor Its Own Products

By Laura Tucker
News Amazon Search Algorithm Featured

There’s no doubt that shopping online makes things easier. There’s also no doubt that shopping at Amazon makes it even easier. It makes it so we don’t really even have to search too much: just go to the app or website, type in what you’re searching for, and you get an entire list. You don’t even have to go through the entire list, as what you’re searching for is often right there at the top.

Except it’s not really that cut and dry, as by not looking through the whole list, you’re actually doing yourself a disservice. People who have worked for Amazon claim the company worked on that algorithm to boost their own brand, such as Kindles, Echos, etc.

Amazon’s Search Algorithm Tweaks

If this is what Amazon is truly doing, adjusting its search to favor its own products, it could find itself in trouble with antitrust regulators.

The algorithm was last modified late last year, with the Seattle-based retail business and the Palo Alto, California-based search team, known as A9m going up against each other.

The A9 employees claim they were pressured by the retail branch to make the Amazon products place higher in the search results. While the two groups were kept separate before, now they both have the same boss, Doug Herrington, the head of retail.

News Amazon Search Algorithm Kindle

“As any store would do, we consider the profitability of the products we list and feature on the site, but it is just one metric and not in any way a key driver of what we show customers,” claims a company spokeswoman, denying that the algorithm was changed to take profitability into account or to push its products more.

But by pushing items that are more profitable, it could mean they are pushing the Amazon brand more. There are other things that are taken into consideration in the search algorithm, and it’s possible that third-party products may be more profitable for Amazon than its own label.

This news just doesn’t come up at a good time for the company. Amazon and the other big tech companies – Google, Apple, and Facebook – are being investigated in a federal antitrust probe in the United States. The European Union fined Google $2.7 billion for manipulating search results to promote its own brand, and Apple tweaked its search algorithm for the App Store so that its apps weren’t always ranked at the top.

Erosion of Trust

The problem with all this is the erosion of trust in the big four. The more and more the public hears stories of them promoting their own brands and making questionable marketing decisions, the more the public loses trust in them.

For what they’re selling, and the rate at which the public’s reliability on their products multiplies, trust is needed. But those big four may have hurt their images too much at this point.

What do you think about Amazon promoting its own products in its search algorithm? Do you see it as antitrust? Let us know your thoughts and concerns in the comments below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.