The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Senate appear to be stepping up their antitrust investigations of Google, a development that could prove perilous for the Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which is already fending off a formal investigation in Europe.

The FTC is planning to serve Google with civil subpoenas as part of an examination of market power in Google’s search advertising business, according to a report this morning in The Wall Street Journal.

A Google representative declined to comment on any discussions with the FTC or the possibility of a broad antitrust investigation.

Google has shed market share to Microsoft over the past year, according to data released last week by research firm Compete.

It’s dropped from 73.9 percent to 63.6 percent, while Microsoft’s Bing has increased its market share to 17 percent.

So far, at least, Google has managed to avoid experiencing what happened to Microsoft at the hands of an ungentle Justice Department, which filed a broad antitrust suit in the late 1990s that eventually included a demand that the Redmond, Wash., company be split into halves.

In 2001, a federal appeals court rejected a breakup but allowed the rest of the case to proceed.

Microsoft was not exactly eager to compromise with Washington, D.C., regulators and bureaucrats. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer once said “to heck with Janet Reno,” the attorney general during the Clinton administration.
For a while, it sounded like Microsoft founder Bill Gates was channeling capitalist doyenne Ayn Rand, saying in 1998 that the technology industry’s successes were due to lack of interference from Uncle Sam, and claiming that “the government is still trying to slow Microsoft down.”

It even launched a Web site, FreeToInnovate.com, which let like-minded souls send a pointed note to their member of Congress.
Google, by contrast, has shown more of a willingness to compromise: In March, it settled an FTC investigation into Google Buzz by agreeing to 20 years of privacy oversight.

A few days later, it inked a deal with the Justice Department, including non-discrimination terms, that let it buy ITA Software for $700 million.

Most prominently, Google abandoned a proposed advertising partnership with Yahoo at the last minute, a move that avoided a near-certain DOJ antitrust lawsuit.

Also this week, a U.S. Senate committee probing antitrust and Internet search topics is threatening to subpoena Google CEO Larry Page or Chairman Eric Schmidt to testify on a hearing that will be held before the August recess.

These types of tussles over witness lists are commonplace: politicians know that a CEO’s appearance will draw more press attention, so they tend to ask for it.

But when Apple was pressed for details about location privacy by a Senate committee last month, it sent a vice president, not CEO Steve Jobs.

Google has been reluctant to provide either Page or Schmidt for the Senate antitrust subcommittee’s hearing, saying other executives would be more appropriate.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee, the senior Republican on the panel, said yesterday he was “very disappointed in Google’s response.”

“We’re in talks with the subcommittee and will send an executive who can best answer their questions,” a Google spokesman said this morning.

Google has proposed David Drummond, its senior vice president and chief legal officer, who also heads its business development and acquisition teams, as the executive best able to address the committee’s concerns.

In 2007, Drummond testified before the Senate antitrust subcommittee about the antitrust implications of the Google-DoubleClick merger.

A year later, he returned to the same panel to discuss the proposed advertising relationship with Yahoo.

A June 10 letter to Google from Lee and Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl, the Democratic chair of the subcommittee, said: “A hearing on this important topic would be incomplete without the direct perspective and views from one of Google’s top two executives, each of whom has played a prominent role at the company throughout the last decade.”

At a briefing in San Francisco on Tuesday, Google demonstrated a new feature called Instant Pages which allows certain Web pages to pop-up in a user’s Web browser nearly instantaneously, as well as a revamped version of its website for mobile devices.

Google, the world’s No.1 Internet search engine, said that traffic coming from mobile devices such as smartphones has increased by a factor of five during the past two years.

“We see all this mobile traffic growing on top of our desktop (PC) traffic,” Google Fellow Amit Singhal said.

Singhal said that consumers’ increased use of mobile devices benefits Google by allowing people to continue searching the Internet during times when searches on desktop PCs typically wane, such as after 9 p.m., during the weekends and during the summer months.

“There is no summer slump” with Internet searches on mobile devices, he said.

But Google’s search event – which the company billed as a chance to see new technology and learn about Google’s “vision” for search – was light on new features that weave social networking elements into its search results.

“It’s their huge, gaping Achilles heel,” BGC Partner Colin Gillis said of Google’s social networking capabilities.

Maintaining its role as the main gateway to information on the Internet is key for Google, which generated roughly $29 billion in revenue last year — primarily from search ads.

Some believe Google’s position at the center of the Internet universe is not as secure as it once was, as a new generation of mobile computing gadgets changes consumers’ Web-browsing habits and as fast-growing Internet social networks like Facebook and Twitter emerge as popular online hangouts.

Shares of Google, which closed Tuesday’s regular session at $508.37, are down roughly 15 percent since the start of the year.

Microsoft Corp has sought to distinguish its Bing search engine by incorporating data from Facebook’s more than 500 million users, promoting its so-called social search capabilities in television commercials.

Asked about the lack of new social search features at the event, Google executives cited announcements earlier this year such as the special “+1″ buttons which allow users to endorse Web pages and to view recommendations from friends within their search results.

So far Google’s market share has not shown any decline with 65.5 percent of the U.S. search market in May, up slightly from 65.4 percent in April, according to Web analytics firm comScore. Yahoo Inc had 15.9 percent of the market in May and Microsoft had 14.1 percent.

With traffic to its site increasingly coming from people on the go, Google introduced a new version of its mobile website that features large buttons that deliver information about nearby restaurants, gas stations and bank machines, among other things.

Google also showcased a new search feature for desktop PCs that analyzes an image and retrieves relevant information about it, such as which country appears to be depicted in the background of a family snapshot.

The company said its new Instant Pages feature could eliminate 2 seconds to 5 seconds from the time it takes for a user to conduct a Web search and arrive at the desired page.

The technology works by predicting the search result a user is most likely to click and automatically downloading that page in the background.

“Every time we shave even 50 milliseconds from the search process, users search more and more,” said Google’s Singhal.

Google said the Instant Pages feature will initially be available as an add-on to Google’s Chrome Web browser and that it planned to make it available for mobile devices in the coming weeks.

Google Inc unveiled new features and technology to speed up Web searches and to make it easier for people to use its flagship search engine as they increasingly access the Internet from handheld mobile devices.

At a briefing in San Francisco on Tuesday, Google demonstrated a new feature called Instant Pages which allows certain Web pages to pop-up in a user’s Web browser nearly instantaneously, as well as a revamped version of its website for mobile devices.

Google, the world’s No.1 Internet search engine, said that traffic coming from mobile devices such as smartphones has increased by a factor of five during the past two years.

“We see all this mobile traffic growing on top of our desktop (PC) traffic,” Google Fellow Amit Singhal said.

Singhal said that consumers’ increased use of mobile devices benefits Google by allowing people to continue searching the Internet during times when searches on desktop PCs typically wane, such as after 9 p.m., during the weekends and during the summer months.

“There is no summer slump” with Internet searches on mobile devices, he said.

But Google’s search event – which the company billed as a chance to see new technology and learn about Google’s “vision” for search – was light on new features that weave social networking elements into its search results.

“It’s their huge, gaping Achilles heel,” BGC Partner Colin Gillis said of Google’s social networking capabilities.

Maintaining its role as the main gateway to information on the Internet is key for Google, which generated roughly $29 billion in revenue last year — primarily from search ads.

Some believe Google’s position at the center of the Internet universe is not as secure as it once was, as a new generation of mobile computing gadgets changes consumers’ Web-browsing habits and as fast-growing Internet social networks like Facebook and Twitter emerge as popular online hangouts.

Shares of Google, which closed Tuesday’s regular session at $508.37, are down roughly 15 percent since the start of the year.

Microsoft Corp has sought to distinguish its Bing search engine by incorporating data from Facebook’s more than 500 million users, promoting its so-called social search capabilities in television commercials.

Asked about the lack of new social search features at the event, Google executives cited announcements earlier this year such as the special “+1″ buttons which allow users to endorse Web pages and to view recommendations from friends within their search results.

So far Google’s market share has not shown any decline with 65.5 percent of the U.S. search market in May, up slightly from 65.4 percent in April, according to Web analytics firm comScore. Yahoo Inc had 15.9 percent of the market in May and Microsoft had 14.1 percent.

With traffic to its site increasingly coming from people on the go, Google introduced a new version of its mobile website that features large buttons that deliver information about nearby restaurants, gas stations and bank machines, among other things.

Google also showcased a new search feature for desktop PCs that analyzes an image and retrieves relevant information about it, such as which country appears to be depicted in the background of a family snapshot.

The company said its new Instant Pages feature could eliminate 2 seconds to 5 seconds from the time it takes for a user to conduct a Web search and arrive at the desired page. The technology works by predicting the search result a user is most likely to click and automatically downloading that page in the background.

“Every time we shave even 50 milliseconds from the search process, users search more and more,” said Google’s Singhal.

Google said the Instant Pages feature will initially be available as an add-on to Google’s Chrome Web browser and that it planned to make it available for mobile devices in the coming weeks.