If you want to take over the world, you usually have to ask the world’s permission – although a few entrepreneurs, such as Alexander the Great, have tried skipping this step. Google’s stated goal is to organise the world’s information, not the world itself, but information is power, so the issue of quid pro quo was bound to arise.

Google has signalled willingness to put clear labels on its own services, from maps to stock quotations to flight schedules, when these appear prominently in search results. That is an effort to placate European regulators, which worry that Google uses its dominant position in general or “horizontal” search to squeeze out competitors in “verticals”, such as travel or shopping. Google, critics allege, can manipulate its horizontal results pages to make rivals’ vertical offerings in effect invisible.

Given Google’s share of searches (60 per cent in the US and much higher in Europe, ComScore reckons), regulators are right to worry. But search engines are not computer operating systems. Switching costs between search engines or similar applications are vanishingly low. And consumers’ desire for full information means too much self-serving fiddling by Google may drive them away. That explains why Google is already reasonably transparent. It is not hard to look at a results page and to find the paid ads and the Google products, or to find its competitors.