With other Google services being integrated with its search engine and Google offering both paid search and free search results, there's an "enormous possibility for abuse," said Eric Clemons, an operations and information management professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Google's paid search service gives the company an incentive to keep its free search results from getting too good, Clemons said at a Technology Policy Institute (TPI) forum on Google and antitrust in Washington, D.C. "I've always wanted to say this in Washington: Follow the money," he said.

The FTC's antitrust probe of Google, , will give investigators a chance to see how Google ranks search results, giving the public a "first line of defense" against anticompetitive practices, said Oren Bracha, a law professor focused on technology and intellectual property at the University of Texas.

"The whole search process is shrouded in secrecy," Bracha said. "It's a big black box, and nobody except Google really knows what's going on in there. Somebody gets to open the black box."

While Clemons and Bracha argued in favor of an investigation, other speakers on Friday questioned whether an antitrust probe of Google was appropriate. Though some competitors have complained about Google's search dominance and its search rankings, antitrust cases must show harm to consumers, said Geoffrey Manne, founder of the International Center for Law and Economics, an organization that has received support from Google.