Google to remove shopping ads from search results in Turkey

Google is preparing to remove shopping ads from search results in Turkey, which come up at the very top of the page almost anytime that a “shopping-related” search is done. The move comes following the Turkish Competition Authority's ruling earlier this year that the company is obstructing competitors’ activities in the online shopping services market.

Wednesday July 29 2020 06:52 pm

Duvar English

Google has announced that as of Aug. 10 it will no longer display shopping ads in Turkey search results after it has been imposed a hefty fine by the Turkish Competition Authority (TCA) earlier this year on the grounds that it was abusing its dominant market position.

In February, the TCA fined Google 98.35 million Turkish Liras ($16.26 million) saying that it was obstructing competitors’ activities in the online shopping services market in the country by abusing its dominant position in the search engine market.

The TCA said that Google made the efforts of other companies difficult with algorithm updates it made for public search services and with Google AdWords.

Google said on July 29 that it offered various solutions to Turkey but the “acceptability of these solutions was currently vague.”

“Therefore in order to continue our activities at a legal framework, we have unfortunately no option other than to remove shopping advertisements from Google Search pages in Turkey,” the company said.

Google shopping ads are the automatic product listings ads which come up at the very top of search results almost anytime that a “shopping-related” search in Google is done. And they do not just show up in standard search results. They also show up in the “shopping” tab.