Why is Google meeting with White House staff on a weekly basis?

Google has met with White House officials once a week for the last four years, it is reported.

High-profile search giant staff like chairman Eric Schmidt met with President Barack Obama's White House 230 terms since Obama was first elected, visitor logs obtained by the Wall Street Journal demonstrate.

Some of those meetings occurred in the run-up to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)'s 2012 decision to settle with Google, rather than pursue a huge anti-trust lawsuit against the company, over alleged anti-competitive practices.

The commission voted four to one to settle the patent investigation into Google's injunction requests. It voted five to zero to end the probe of Google's search practices.

"I never saw any real likelihood that the feds were going to insert themselves between one of the most popular brands in the world and the constituency that adores it," said Whit Andrews, an analyst for Gartner, said at the time.

The FTC claims it "conducted an exhaustive investigation" into the search firm at the time, and has issued a statement defending its impartiality.

However, the WSJ outlines that Google spent 11.3 million on lobbying in Washington last year, only being outspent by Comcast which had just 20 White House meetings over the same period.

Meanwhile, ex-Google staffer Megan Smith was appointed as the new CTO of the White House last year.

None of the visitor logs show what was discussed at the White House, something the FTC was keen to point out.

Its statement read: "The article suggests that a series of disparate and unrelated meetings involving FTC officials and executive branch officials or Google representatives somehow affected the Commission's decision to close the search investigation in early 2013.

"Not a single fact is offered to substantiate this misleading narrative."

IT Pro has approached Google for comment, but we had not received a response at the time of publication.