The flagged page
Grading report
76 exchanges read · 11 moments flagged · outline checked against 4 topics
7
answers that stopped being answers
Outline coverage: 4 of 4 topics actually covered (100%)
The value Google pays for default placement
Googles 2005 position on Microsofts IE7 default
Whether users change defaults
What the word default means
Moments worth a second look
Ranked: answers that stopped being answers first, then the long narratives, then the evasions.
Q. And Google understood more broadly that defaults mattered for competition in search, right?A. We've always valued the importance of defaults. As I said earlier, again, it depends on the context; it depends on the implementation; it depends on the product; it depends on the merit of what you're offering to users; it depends on user likelihood. But, yes, there are scenarios in which defaults are very valuable.
Non-answer54 words that never touch the question. This is where the follow-up lived.
Q. And Google understood, in the context of this letter, that defaults mattered, right?A. In the context of this implementation of what Microsoft was doing around IE7, the previous default was not something users would ever change. And so carrying that over, there was no user default setting involved. That's what we were arguing.
Non-answer40 words that never touch the question. This is where the follow-up lived.
Q. So Google's concerns over Microsoft's announcement for setting a default in IE7 was that in the vast majority of cases, the new search engine default would be Microsoft's own search engine, right?A. No, our concern was a lot of us had invested -- you know, they're a platform. We had invested time and effort to build applications like Toolbar. We had invested hundreds of people, built a product over years, and users were using that. Not just us, there were other companies, like the Yahoo! Toolbar. And to that extent, we were fine with an implementation which would just honor some notion of what users are doing. But we felt, you know, that's not what they were trying to do.
Non-answer87 words that never touch the question. This is where the follow-up lived.
Q. You understood before Mr. Sharma's presentation in 2007 that defaults were important?A. Again, the word default can mean so many things, so it depends on what you're trying to do in what context; whether what you're trying to do is aligned with what a user would want, right. And there are cases where defaults haven't mattered, because that's not what the user is looking to do. So with that caveat, yes. Done correctly, and if you're putting a product out in front of users which users like and want to use, yes, defaults can make a difference.
Non-answer85 words that never touch the question. This is where the follow-up lived.
Q. And one of the methods that was a topic of conversation to increase search in 2007 was the use of defaults, right?A. It was the context of -- I mean, this is talking about we were trying to actually build a product called iGoogle which was a browser home page to compete with Yahoo!, which was a popular home page at the time -- or AOL, people had many different home pages. So this is both trying to understand the importance of building it -- Google didn't have a home page product, and Ms. Sieving, who worked for me at that time, was leading in developing this home page product. So both the importance of what would the value be to have a home page product, and then having that as the default. So those were the kinds of things we were thinking through.
Non-answer119 words that never touch the question. This is where the follow-up lived.
Q. And Google has paid revenue share in exchange for defaults since at least 2005, because defaults have been valuable for a long time, right?A. You know, we definitely see value. It depends on the context of the deal, it depends on how it's implemented, and so the value can change. But we try to understand it, and based on that we do deals, yes.
Non-answer40 words that never touch the question. This is where the follow-up lived.
Q. And Google pays tens of billions of dollars every year because being set as the default is valuable, right?A. Yes. I mean, it's enhanced promotion of Google Search. Over time it leads to increased usage of Google Search. And as I said earlier, there are other provisions which go with some of these agreements as well.
Non-answer37 words that never touch the question. This is where the follow-up lived.
Q. So Google believed that by setting MSN Search as the default search engine in IE7, Microsoft was putting its own interests above those of its end users, right?A. That's not -- it's the stated reason as to why they were doing that, right. I think they were not saying they were going to set MSN Search as the default. They said they would honor whatever the default -- you know, they presented it as they're going to honor user choice based on a hidden search setting -- which you can acknowledge -- as you can see, even employees from Microsoft acknowledged, didn't know existed. So that was the issue we were taking into account.
Long narrative82 words in one run. Rabbit trails like this are where outline coverage quietly dies.
Q. And Microsoft -- withdrawn. Google sent Microsoft a letter about Microsoft's plans for setting the default search engine in IE7, right?A. Yeah, I recall one of our concerns was as they were developing IE7 and they were putting a search box in the browser, they had announced a plan to migrate the search settings, not based on toolbars which people were using. But there was a hidden search -- default search setting in previous versions of the browser which didn't matter, because there was no search box in the browser. And they were relying on that setting, which was just set to Microsoft for this new search box, which we thought didn't reflect what pretty much any user wanted from their browser.
Long narrative100 words in one run. Rabbit trails like this are where outline coverage quietly dies.
Q. You thought Mr. Sharma's analysis on the importance of Google being set as the default home page for market -- to increase market share was important enough to share with Google's top management in the EMG, right?A. That's right. Google was a much smaller company at that time, so definitely this was. I think the Google product strategy meetings, these were forums designed to cover topics like this, actually go deep and look at product topics across the company. They would have separate EMG meetings to discuss management topics. These were product strategy meetings.
Long narrative57 words in one run. Rabbit trails like this are where outline coverage quietly dies.
Q. Gaining search market share through defaults was an important topic for Google's search team in 2007, right?A. I would say increasing usage of search, you know, was a lot of what we were thinking about. And some of it would be because we gain market share. Some of it is because you're taking existing users, and by giving them more convenient access points, you're making them search more. So both of them could be contributing to it.
Long narrative60 words in one run. Rabbit trails like this are where outline coverage quietly dies.
How this was graded: the transcript excerpts above are public record — the official court-released trial transcript of day 30 of
U.S. v. Google (D.D.C., October 30, 2023), document 985 on the public docket, released by the court reporter in 2024 and mirrored by the Free Law Project's RECAP archive. We took one continuous stretch of the cross-examination (76 exchanges) and joined the Q&A pairs; the flags, counts, and coverage below are the unedited output of the Deposition Grader — a free, browser-based tool that reads Q&A text for the patterns examiners miss in the room. No human at Demur selected or edited these flags; the same input produces the same output for anyone, at
grader.trydemur.com. Also in this series:
Graded: the Bill Gates deposition ·
Graded: the Sackler deposition ·
Graded: the Nadella cross ·
Graded: the Eddy Cue examination.
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