Amazon would have modified its search results to improve the most profitable products

Amazon began modifying its search results last year to focus on profitability over relevance, according to The Wall Street Journal. These changes would have been motivated by requests from Amazon's retail divisions and private label team, which would often have the effect of improving Amazon's products in the search listings.

To avoid antitrust issues at a time when Amazon's role as a product manufacturer and platform company is under surveillance, Amazon does not directly boost products based on their profitability, according to the report. Instead, the Newspaper says that Amazon is reinforcing other factors that its search engine can take into account, which collectively have the effect of raising the most profitable products.

Amazon initially expressed a narrow refusal by saying, "We have not changed the criteria we use to rank search results to include profitability." Newspaper reported, that is, that Amazon has changed the criteria relating to aspects related to profitability without directly increasing profitability. Amazon continued with a later statement explaining more explicitly:The Wall Street Journal wrong "and that the story is" not factually accurate ".

An Amazon spokesperson said the company was looking at "a number of parameters" when testing new features, "including long-term profitability," to see how far these new features were affecting the company. 39, customer experience and our business, as would any rational store, but we do not make decisions based on this metric. "

Although Amazon's gadgets such as Kindle and Echo are its best-known products, the company has rapidly expanded its private label offering in recent years. There are dozens of them, but until now, sales seem to have been weak and Amazon has for the most part failed to break through to commodities such as batteries.

Modifying its search algorithm to focus on products manufactured by Amazon could help increase sales of these products. As the Newspaper In most reports, the majority of clicks come from the first page of the search results, most of them only belonging to the front lines.

Update of September 16th at 2:22 pm ET: This story has been updated with an additional comment from Amazon that more emphatically rejects the NewspaperThe story of