The Google logo sits on the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., July 19, 2016. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)2025-09-02T20:53:29Z SAN FRANCISCO (AP) A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a major makeover of Googles search engine in a crackdown aimed at curbing the corrosive power of an illegal monopoly, but rebuffed the U.S. governments request to break up the company.The 226-page decision made by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., will likely ripple across the technological landscape at a time when the industry is being reshaped by artificial intelligence breakthroughs including conversational answer engines as companies like ChatGPT and Perplexity try to upend Googles long-held position as the internets main gateway.Mehta is trying to rein in Google by placing new restraints on some of the tactics the company deployed to drive traffic to its search engine and other services. But the judge stopped short of banning the multi-billion dollar deals that Google has been making for years to lock in its search engine as the default on smartphones, personal computers and other devices. Those deals, involving payments of more than $26 billion annually, were a focal point of a nearly five-year-old antitrust case brought by the U.S. Justice Department. The judge also rejected the U.S. Justice Departments effort to force Google to sell its popular Chrome browser, concluding the request was a bridge too far.But Mehta is ordering Google to give its current and would-be rivals access to some of its search engines secret sauce the data stockpiled from trillions of queries that helped to continually improve the quality of its search results. MICHAEL LIEDTKE Liedtke has been covering technology and wide range of other business topics for The Associated Press since the turn of the century. twitter mailto RSShttps://feedx.net https://feedx.site