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DealBook: YP, a Mobile Search Firm, Buys Sense Networks

District Judge Upholds Government’s Right to Search Electronics at Border

In his opinion, Judge Edward R. Korman of the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of New York found that the plaintiffs did not have standing for their lawsuit because such searches occur so rarely that “there is not a substantial risk that their electronic devices will be subject to a search or seizure without reasonable suspicion.”

Even if the plaintiffs did have standing, Judge Korman found that they would lose on the merits of the case, ruling that the government does not need reasonable suspicion to examine or confiscate a traveler’s laptop, cellphone or other device at the border.

“There’s no silver lining to this decision,” said Catherine Crump, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs. “It’s not just that we lost the case. It’s that the judge decided against us on multiple alternative grounds.”

The lawsuit was filed in 2010 by Pascal Abidor, a graduate student in Islamic studies, who sued the government after American border agents removed him from an Amtrak train crossing from Canada to New York. He was handcuffed, placed in a cell and questioned for several hours, then his laptop was seized and kept for 11 days.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the National Press Photographers Association were also plaintiffs in the case, arguing that their members travel with confidential information that should be protected from government scrutiny.

In rejecting this argument, Judge Korman cited the rarity of electronic device searches and questioned whether travelers need to carry computers containing sensitive data when they travel abroad.

“While it is true that laptops may make overseas work more convenient,” he wrote, “the precautions plaintiffs may choose to take to ‘mitigate’ the alleged harm associated with the remote possibility of a border search are simply among the many inconveniences associated with international travel.”

Mr. Abidor said he was disappointed but not entirely surprised by the ruling.

“I can’t say it wasn’t foreseeable based on the line of questioning by the judge during the initial hearing,” Mr. Abidor said. “He just seemed so skeptical of the basic premise that people need to travel with devices.”

“These checks are essential to enforcing the law, and protecting national security and public safety,” Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement, “always with the shared goals of protecting the American people while respecting civil rights and civil liberties.”

In his opinion, Judge Korman emphasized how infrequently border agents search or detain electronic devices, but it is unclear how accurately the government tracks these statistics.

According to Customs and Border Protection, the agency conducts about 15 device searches a day at American entry points. But a 2011 assessment of this practice by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the border agency, cited problems with how these incidents are counted.

The report noted: “C.B.P.’s system for entering the results of electronic device searches did not allow analysts to accurately identify incidents and seizures related to electronic device search activity, thus hindering C.B.P.’s ability to monitor and evaluate performance and making it difficult to provide accurate operational data concerning searches of electronic devices.”

While the courts have generally supported the government’s authority to search travelers at the border, based on the government’s interest in combating crime and terrorism, a decision last year placed some limits on more intrusive device searches.

In March, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California ruled in United States v. Cotterman that reasonable suspicion of criminal activity was required for a forensic search of a device confiscated at the border — a more extensive exam, as opposed to a cursory look at photos or other files.

That decision applies to states covered by the Ninth Circuit, including California, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii. Judge Korman’s ruling will not have as much legal impact, since it comes from a district court rather than a circuit court.

“It maintains the status quo, which is that the government is free everywhere except in the Ninth Circuit to conduct all types of electronic device searches without reasonable suspicion,” Ms. Crump from the A.C.L.U. said. “We are considering an appeal, but we haven’t made a decision one way or the other yet.”

Google in Fight Over Content That Appears in Search Results

Mr. Mosley was the victim of a spectacular 2008 sting by News of the World — Rupert Murdoch’s disgraced, and now defunct, tabloid weekly — which posted photos and video of him participating in a sadomasochistic sex party that the paper described as “a sick Nazi orgy with hookers.”

The Nazi claim, in particular, was a bitter one; the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, a World War II-era British fascist, Mr. Mosley has long bristled at the suggestion of Nazi sympathies. He sued News of the World in a London court for breach of privacy and was awarded £60,000, or about $94,000, in damages.

The High Court ruled that there was “no evidence” that the sex party had been “intended to be an enactment of Nazi behavior or adoption of any of its attitudes.” It also found that there had been “no public interest or other justification for the clandestine recording.”

The court ordered News of the World to remove the material in question from the Web, naturally, and there the story might have ended. Except, of course, that the photos and video continue to live on the Internet, via social media and on Web sites maintained by individuals. Mr. Mosley has been fighting ever since to make them disappear.

And that is where Google comes in: Mr. Mosley asked a Paris court during the past week to order the Internet giant to create an algorithm to filter all such photos from its service and search engine, now and forever. His lawyer told the court, the Tribunal de Grande Instance, that if Google France refused to remove the offending images it should face fines.

The French court said it would issue a ruling on Oct. 21. Mr. Mosley has filed a similar case in Hamburg that is to be heard this month.

Google strongly disputes any responsibility.

“We sympathize with Mr. Mosley’s situation,” Google said in a statement, noting that it had always honored his requests to remove obviously incriminating links. “But his proposal to filter the Web would censor legitimate speech, restrict access to information, and stifle innovation.”

The company noted that there was already a solution to the problem: “Going after the actual publishers of the material, and working with Google through our existing and effective removals process.”

Google says that it has already taken down “hundreds of pages” with images that obviously infringe on the court ruling when it is requested to do so, but that there are many cases in which it is not immediately clear whether the content is affected by the ruling, and that in those cases a judge or other competent official should make the decision.

It cites French and E.U. law, which do not require search engines to comb the Web for unlawful content, and it argues that, in any case, many of the hits the photos receive are driven by communications among individuals, so blocking them on search would not end the problem.

A concurrent case, at the European level, would appear to back Google. The European Court of Justice, which is based in Luxembourg, is currently examining a Spanish man’s claim of a “right to be forgotten” on the Web — something Silicon Valley companies oppose.

In a sign that the case might be swinging the technology giants’ way, Niilo Jaaskinen, the Finnish lawyer who serves as advocate general of the court, issued an opinion in June that search engines were not responsible “for personal data appearing on Web pages they process.”

E.U. data protection law “does not entitle a person to restrict or terminate dissemination of personal data that he considers to be harmful or contrary to his interests,” Mr. Jaaskinen wrote. Though the court is not bound by the advocate general’s opinion, it often follows his recommendations. It has yet to decide the matter.

Why would Mr. Mosley seek action against an American company in a French court for actions committed in Britain by a now-defunct English newspaper? It might have to do with France’s strict privacy laws, which make it a criminal offense to record another person — image or sound — in a private space without the person’s consent.

His lawyer, Clara S. Zerbib, said that it was because a Paris court had ruled in 2011 that the recording of the News of the World pictures, without Mr. Mosley’s knowledge in a private place, had been illegal and that a judge might thus find that distributing such pictures on the Internet was also illegal. She noted that Mr. Mosley also worked in France as president of the International Automobile Federation, the Paris-based governing body of Formula One racing, and was concerned about his reputation there.

Mr. Mosley, in a telephone interview, said that Google had been helpful, if not always swift, in answering his requests to remove photos but that he should not have to constantly ask them to do so, since the court ruling had made plain that they were illicit.

“We shouldn’t have to keep asking them every time these photos come up,” Mr. Mosley said. “You have to employ someone to look every day. They shouldn’t put them up in the first place.”

He acknowledged that by fighting Google in court, he was inevitably attracting additional attention, but that he had to do it, because “anybody who’s interested in me will Google me, and the first thing they see are these photos.”

Mr. Mosley and his legal team say there do not appear to be any technical barriers to Google’s doing what he is asking. Google, working to address British concerns about child pornography on the Web, said in June that it had the capacity to identify and block images automatically, using “hashing” technology.

“If you have any respect for the rule of law, and it’s been decided by the court that it’s illegal, then you shouldn’t reproduce them,” he said.

But Google is adamant that the automatic filter Mr. Mosley is demanding would be a blunt tool that would indiscriminately eliminate both lawful and unlawful content, including perhaps reporting on Mr. Mosley’s own case.

“We hope that the French court will not order us to build a censorship machine,” the company said.

Court Says Paralyzing Man During Drug Search Violated Rights

Police suspected that a man named Felix Booker was concealing contraband inside his body. They arrested him on a drug charge and later, against his will, a doctor paralyzed him for eight minutes to take a look.

The Haggler: In Search of Romance, and Maybe a Refund

SOMEHOW, in the four-tenths of a decade that the Haggler has been aiding consumers, no one with dating-service issues has written in. Until now.

Q. I’m an attractive, successful, busy and single mother of three, and dating stinks. So I thought it couldn’t hurt to sign up with It’s Just Lunch, a widely advertised matchmaking service. But it’s been a disaster.

I paid $1,000 for a three-month membership, during which the service was to set up dates from its database, take feedback from each person after the fact and use it to refine selections for subsequent rendezvous.

My first date didn’t really count as a date because the guy never showed. I was then set up with someone else, but we had zero chemistry. After your first date, according to company policy, you have a face-to-face meeting with a staff member. I was looking forward to visiting what I assumed was I.J.L.’s Midtown offices, and drove from Westchester County to Manhattan in the middle of a workday to meet Thelma. (For some reason, you rarely learn the last names of I.J.L.’s employees.) When I arrived at the given address, it was a bar on West 40th Street.

Thelma asked me a bunch of profile questions, which I had already answered for employees who were known to me as Catherine and Jeff.

In the month that followed, little has happened, other than frustrating efforts to e-mail and call company representatives. When I finally did reach someone — Debbie — she agreed that my experience had been subpar, and in an effort to appease me, extended my membership for another month and sent me a $25 gift card. But the card had no funds loaded on it. You expect some rejection when you sign up with a dating service, but hearing “Sorry, this isn’t working” from a CVS employee — I didn’t see that coming.

I’ve asked to have my money refunded. I’ve also asked to have another date set up. So far, I have gotten nowhere.

Can you help?

L.M.

A. You can find a fair number of online complaints about It’s Just Lunch, but how surprising is that? It’s hard to imagine a business with a more high-maintenance clientele than lonely, upmarket singles.

“May you inherit a high-end dating service for U.S. professionals!” — to the Haggler’s ears, that sounds like a pretty good curse.

But It’s Just Lunch, at least in this case, seems to have taken a supremely challenging job and botched it big time. What’s troubling here is not the failed dates, though they aren’t exactly flattering given that fixing people up is what the company does. More vexing are the faulty lines of communication, which led L.M. to speak to seven different company reps over the course of two months. And those conversations usually happened after she had called or e-mailed two or three times.

Is that a failure on It’s Just Lunch’s part? No, said the company’s president, Melissa Brown, who e-mailed the Haggler from the company’s headquarters in Palm Desert, Calif. “We believe it is important to point out that our clients are not assigned to just one dating director,” she wrote, “but instead we work as a team.”

That notion is hard to square with a “Welcome to It’s Just Lunch” e-mail that L.M. received soon after she signed up with the service in May. “My name is Jeff, and I will be working with you on all of your dates from this point forward,” Jeff wrote.

Which is it, people? A team? Or Jeff? You can’t blame the customer for assuming that it was the latter.

After looking into L.M.’s file, Ms. Brown decided “there was some miscommunication that happened on our end,” which she described as “not typical” for a client.

“We strive to provide a level of service to our clients,” she wrote, “and any time this threshold is not met or exceeded, we will rectify the situation.”

The Haggler notes that Ms. Brown said nothing about a “high” level of service, or a “reasonably decent” level of service. Just a level of service. Which means that there’s no telling where the company sets the bar. You get a sense, though, from what happened next.

To rectify this situation, It’s Just Lunch e-mailed L.M. to say it would issue a refund. But not a full refund. L.M. didn’t realize it at the time — it was part of terms and conditions she apparently didn’t read — but she had signed up for a membership that provided her with three dates or three months of service, whichever came second. Because L.M. had been on one date, she would be sent a check for two-thirds of her $1,000, or precisely $666.67.

Yes, the company rounded up. Sending a check for $666.66 — hey, that would have seemed a little stinting.

Pardon the snark. But the Haggler can’t help himself, mostly since this entertainingly precise refund had a string attached. Actually, “string” is the wrong word. It was more like a whoopee cushion because it was so ridiculous.

A “refund settlement agreement” for L.M.’s signature was e-mailed to her last week, requiring that she “refrain from making any statements, public or private, written or oral, which are derogatory or critical or may discredit, malign, or disparage the releasee’s reputation or business.” Publishing such statements in a newspaper was expressly prohibited in the next sentence.

L.M. naturally refused to sign this contract, causing It’s Just Lunch to modify it to exclude e-mails she’d already sent to the Haggler. That’s a step in the right direction, though she hasn’t signed that document, either, because she reserves the right to discuss it. The Haggler understands. He, too, would think twice about setting up any single friends with It’s Just Lunch. Forget about dates. The company can’t even handle a breakup.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Hard-Drive Search Raises Fourth Amendment Issue

Citing the dangers of overly broad search warrants for computer hard drives, a federal appeals court has vacated the conditional guilty plea of a Tioga County man who admitted to production and possession of child pornography.

Tool Kit: Swindles and Spam, Lurking in Your Search Results

Though the major search engines discourage such deception, that hasn’t stopped companies from engaging in such practices — and fooling users in the process.

Even someone with decades of search expertise, like Duane Forrester, a senior product manager at Bing, can fall victim to a Web scam.

“I was looking to buy a new lens for a digital camera, and I found a store that had one for $200 less than everyone else,” Mr. Forrester said. “Turns out the store was a fly-by-night shop out of the U.K. that sold broken products. I called the company and got my refund, but I still fell into the pothole.”

Millions of “dirty” sites litter the Web. The Web security firm Blue Coat Systems concluded in its 2012 security report that search engines topped the list of spam entry points, before e-mail and other sources. At a minimum, off-topic spam results are a nuisance. More perniciously, spammers can infect computers with malware and phish for sensitive personal data like credit card information. Here are some ways to avoid search spam.

LEARN TO SPOT SPAM Mastering the art of smarter searching won’t always shield you from getting spammed. That is why, as a first step, you should look before you click.

Don’t assume that the top results are the most useful or even the safest. Look at the letters that follow the period at the end of a Web address. Top-level domains like .com and .info, as well as top-level country code domains like .fr (for France) are prime targets for spammers.

One reason is that spammers know that spelling mistakes happen. It’s common to forget the “o” in a dot-com search, for instance. So if you want a site that ends in .com, but mistakenly type in .cm (the country code for Cameroon), you might get spam instead of the page you wanted.

Many sites will also take advantage of Web address shorteners like Bitly to direct you to an unsavory source. So be cautious about clicking those truncated URLs as well.

Both Google and Bing tip searchers off to potentially unsafe sites, wherever possible. If a search engine warns you that a site is potentially unsafe, browse at your own risk. And as Mr. Forrester’s tale shows, a site that is offering discounts that appear too good to be true may indeed be offering deals too good to be true.

In addition, before making any purchase on a lesser-known site, take a look around. Do you see a listed address? If so, map it. Look for the e-mail address. If your only contact option is a Gmail or Yahoo account, something may be awry.

A site’s language, too, may be a giveaway, especially when you are conducting a local search.

Flagrant grammar and spelling errors may signal that the owner is based elsewhere. And if you spot the term “free” scrawled across a Web site, proceed with caution.

SOME SITES ARE RISKIER It is important to know what separates a potential spam site from a harmless one. The difference may be counterintuitive. For example, pornography domains may be safer to browse than some mainstream content. According to Cisco’s 2013 annual security report, “online advertisements are 182 times more likely to deliver malicious content than pornographic sites.”

Matt Cutts, who heads the Web spam team at Google, said this was because pornography sites were well monitored. “People who run porn sites are tech-savvy, and they pay a lot of attention to visitors, so they notice unusual things quickly,” he said.

Though a search result may be safe, it may not be useful. A prime example is Yahoo Answers. The community-driven site consistently ranks high across the major engines on question-related queries. But the quality of its answers varies greatly and the site is often more useful for a chuckle than legitimate insight. Learn to spot and selectively skip these sites.

Similarly, instructional sites like eHow may place a higher premium on quantity over quality content, so you might not find exactly what you are searching for there.

Be wary of Web pages that oversell you on their supposed legitimacy. One Better Business Bureau logo is fine. A series of logos promoting a site’s professionalism or expertise is a red flag.

Almost anyone with rudimentary Photoshop skills can create and attach fake logos on to a site. You can crosscheck any awards by going to the source.

It is also a good idea to check whether a Web site is certified. The Department of Homeland Security offers more information on this.

SOME SEARCHES ATTRACT SPAM Some searches are more enticing to spammers than others. Credit report queries are a top target. Remember, there are only three major national credit agencies. If you are using an outside party to check credit reports, do so carefully.

Be extra cautious when conducting travel and insurance searches. Some sites create travel tips for the express purpose of drawing you into their hotel or other travel-related business. It is best to seek out travel information from a more trusted site.

Search results for lyrics, videos and screen savers also pose an increased risk. For example, pages with downloadable content, like those offering ring tones, provide an enticing built-in audience for spammers because the user is actively looking to install software.

When you search also matters. Spammers tend to come out in force on Cyber Monday and other big shopping periods.

Nor is spam limited to text. A site with many broken image links may be designed that way intentionally. It is easier to sell an outdated model if customers don’t see the product. Use a reverse image search service like TinEye to find out if an image has been pulled from another site.

BEEF UP YOUR BROWSER As the search leader, Google is targeted more than any other engine. Chrome users can install a spam extension that lets users identify potential spam sites and block them from their search results by clicking on a “spam” text link next to each result.

You can also change your Google ad settings and opt out of the company’s advertising cookies.

SEEK OUT CUSTOM ENGINES Another way to avoid getting spam — and to get more relevant results — is to go directly to a specialized search engine, where the results are already filtered for your query.

You could go to Google Books for book searches and know you will more likely get book results for “The Great Gatsby,” say, and not offers for “Gatsby” T-shirts. There are also engines like Science.gov and Scirus — both useful for science-related queries. Another valuable specialized engine is iSEEK Education. Lastly, you can use the image service Picsearch to filter photo searches.

With Graph Search, Facebook Bets on More Sharing

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s greatest triumph has been to persuade a seventh of the world’s population to share their personal lives online.

Now the social network is taking on its archrival, Google, with a search tool to mine that personal information, just as people are growing more cautious about sharing on the Internet and even occasionally removing what they have already put up.

Whether Facebook’s more than one billion users will continue to divulge even more private details will determine whether so-called social search is the next step in how we navigate the online world. It will also determine whether Facebook has found a business model that will make it a lot of money.

“There’s a big potential upside for both Facebook and users, but getting people to change their behaviors in relation to what they share will not be easy,” said Andrew T. Stephen, who teaches marketing at the University of Pittsburgh and studies consumer behavior on online social networks.

This week, Facebook unveiled its search tool, which it calls graph search, a reference to the network of friends its users have created. The company’s algorithms will filter search results for each person, ranking the friends and brands that it thinks a user would trust the most. At first, it will mine users’ interests, photos, check-ins and “likes,” but later it will search through other information, including status updates.

“While the usefulness of graph search increases as people share more about their favorite restaurants, music and other interests, the product doesn’t hinge on this,” a Facebook spokesman, Jonathan Thaw, said.

Nevertheless, the company engineers who created the tool — former Google employees — say that the project will not reach its full potential if Facebook data is “sparse,” as they call it. But the company is confident people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.

The things people declare on Facebook will be useful, when someone searches for those interests, Tom Stocky, one of the creators of Facebook search, said in an interview this week. Conversely, by liking more things, he said, people will become more useful in the eyes of their friends.

“You might be inclined to ‘like’ what you like so when your friends search, they’ll find it,” he said. “I probably would never have liked my dentist on Facebook before, but now I do because it’s a way of letting my friends know.”

Mr. Stocky offered these examples of how more information may be desirable: A single man may want to be discovered when a friend of a friend is searching for eligible bachelors in San Francisco or a restaurant that stays open late may want to be found by a night owl.

“People have shared all this great stuff on Facebook,” Mr. Stocky said. “It’s latent value. We wanted a way to unlock that.”

Independent studies suggest that Facebook users are becoming more careful about how much they reveal online, especially since educators and employers typically scour Facebook profiles.

A Northwestern University survey of 500 young adults in the summer of 2012 found that the majority avoided posting status updates because they were concerned about who would see them. The study also found that many had deleted or blocked contacts from seeing their profiles and nearly two-thirds had untagged themselves from a photo, post or check-in.

“These behavioral patterns seem to suggest that many young adults are less keen on sharing at least certain details about their lives rather than more,” said Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern, who led the yet unpublished study among men and women aged 21 and 22.

Also last year, the Pew Internet Center found that social network users, including those on Facebook, were more aggressively pruning their profiles — untagging photos, removing friends and deleting comments.

Mobile Apps Drive Rapid Changes in Search Technology

Google has repeatedly made the argument — and the commission agreed — that the speed of change in the technology industry made it impossible for regulators to impose restrictions without stalling future innovations.

Exhibit A is the mobile device. Nowhere has technology changed as rapidly and consumer behavior as broadly. As people abandon desktop computers for mobile ones, existing tech companies’ business models are being upended and new companies are blooming.

“Mobile is very much a moving target,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has been a paid adviser to Google. “This is a market in which new competitors come in a week’s time.”

When the commission began its investigation 19 months ago, for instance, the iPhone did not have the Siri voice search, Apple did not have its own mapping service and Yelp’s mobile apps had no ads. By the time the inquiry concluded, all of that had changed. Google had new competitors on all sides trying to chip away at its hold on the mobile search and advertising market.

Still, Google is even more dominant on mobile phones than on desktop computers. It has 96 percent of the world’s mobile search market, according to StatCounter, which tracks Web use. It collects 57 percent of mobile ad revenue in the United States, while Facebook, its nearest competitor, gets just 9 percent, according to eMarketer.

But, analysts say, as people change their search habits on mobile devices — bypassing Google to go straight to apps like Yelp’s, for example — that dominance could wane, or a competitor could swoop in and knock Google off its perch.

“It’s important to recognize that many mobile apps are really vertical search engines,” said Rebecca Lieb, a digital media analyst at the Altimeter Group. “It is impossible to really say anyone dominates a section of mobile in a secure way right now.”

On cellphones or tablets, for instance, people increasingly skip Google altogether in favor of apps like Flixster for movie times or Kayak for flights.

Apple is taking on mobile search with Siri on the iPhone, which can answer questions about the weather or search for nearby restaurants. With its new mapping service, Apple has also entered local search.

On Friday, Blekko, a search start-up, introduced an app called Izik for Apple and Android devices. It tries to make searching more tablet-friendly by showing images instead of just links, and making it easier to swipe through many pages of results with a finger.

On mobile devices, said Rich Skrenta, chief executive of Blekko, “the user experience is so different that we think it opens things up. On your desktop, if it doesn’t look like Google, you think that’s not a search engine. On a tablet, it’s just vastly different.”

Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., said at a news conference Thursday that the speed of change in the tech industry meant that “you want to be careful before you apply sanctions.”

The commission also considered Google’s partnerships with cellphone makers like Samsung and HTC that license Google search on phones, so that a search box shows up on the home screen. In the end it decided not to take action against Google.

Some Google critics said that even though the competitive landscape is different on mobile devices, it should not have influenced the government’s analysis of Google’s behavior on the desktop Web.

“There’s no doubt that mobile applications, including Yelp’s, give consumers the ability to bypass the major search engines and go directly to the best provider of the service they’re looking for,” said Vince Sollitto, vice president for government relations at Yelp. Still, he added, “I don’t see how that impacts how someone is acting anticompetitively on the desktop.”

(One of Google’s concessions to the federal agency, that it would allow other Web companies to ask Google not to show their content in its own vertical search products — a chief complaint of Yelp’s — applies to mobile as well.)

But others said antitrust enforcement in the 21st century needs to be more agile.

Nick Wingfield contributed reporting from Seattle.

F.T.C. Staff Prepares Antitrust Case Against Google Over Search

The government’s escalating pursuit of Google is the most far-reaching antitrust investigation of a corporation since the landmark federal case against Microsoft in the late 1990s. The agency’s central focus is whether Google manipulates search results to favor its own products, and makes it harder for competitors and their products to appear prominently on a results page.

The staff recommendation is in a detailed draft memo of more than 100 pages that is being shared with the five F.T.C. commissioners, said two people briefed on the inquiry.

The memo is still being edited and changes could be made, but these are mostly fine-tuning and will not alter the broad conclusions reached after an inquiry that began more than a year ago, said these people, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

Google said in a statement on Friday, “We are happy to answer any questions that regulators have about our business.” In the past it has said many times that “competition is a click away.”

The commission is also building a team to take Google to court, if it comes to that. Last spring, it hired a seasoned litigator to help with the case, Beth A. Wilkinson, a partner in the firm Paul, Weiss in Washington. In a further sign that it means business, last week it brought on a well-known economist as a consultant: Richard Gilbert of the University of California, Berkeley.

The F.T.C. staff memo does not mean that the government will sue Google for antitrust violations. Next, the vote of three of the five F.T.C. commissioners would be required. And each step is a further prod for Google to make concessions to reach a settlement before going to court. Last month, Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the F.T.C., said a final decision on whether to sue Google would be made before the end of this year.

The Google investigation echoes the Microsoft case in a basic way. Google, like Microsoft in the personal computer industry, has drawn complaints from rivals and antitrust regulators as it has expanded its business beyond its dominant product, search and search advertising. Google has aggressively built off this main business to fields including online commerce and smartphone software.

As it expands its empire, Google takes on new competitors and brings formidable resources. Rivals may suffer, Google says, but the company is improving its products and services, benefiting consumers and the economy.

The American inquiry is moving in tandem with a major antitrust investigation in Europe. The European authorities are pressing ahead and seeking changes in Google’s behavior.

Speaking in New York last month, Joaquín Almunia, the European Union’s competition commissioner, pointed to antitrust regulators’ concerns that Google is “using its dominance in online search to foreclose rival specialized search engines and search advertisers.”

Google is also being investigated by the attorneys general of six states: Texas, Ohio, New York, California, Oklahoma and Mississippi.

Given the momentum of the investigations, antitrust experts say, the F.T.C. staff recommendation was to some extent expected.

The F.T.C. investigators have looked at a wide range of Google’s business practices, according to companies that have been questioned and received subpoenas from the agency.

The areas of inquiry include accusations of manipulating the search results it displays to favor Google commerce services it has developed like Google Shopping for buying goods and Google Places for advertising local restaurants and businesses. In the civilian subpoenas, the F.T.C. calls this “preferencing.”

The investigators are also looking into whether Google’s automated advertising marketplace, AdWords, discriminates against advertisers from competing online commerce services like comparison shopping sites and consumer review Web sites.

Claire Cain Miller and Edward Wyatt contributed reporting.