The European Commission has received three complaints over Google and now intend to start an investigation. The three complaints are from Foundem, a UK-based “price compare”-portal, French legaladvice search engine ejustice.fr and german Ciao, a company below Microsoft.
Foundem believes that Google’s search algorithms place Foundem’s pages worse in Google, because Foundem is a competing search engine. A similar reason is found in the complaint from ejustice.fr as well.
Google has always used various penalty filters to remove certain sites entirely from its search results or place them so far down the rankings that they will never be found. Whereas these penalties used to be reserved for spam, or sites caught attempting to cheat Google’s algorithms, they are now increasingly targeted at perfectly legitimate vertical search and directory services. – Foundem
Google admits that their algorithm might not be perfect but also that it’s a big challenge getting it right all the time. They strive to present the results for the users that they believe are most valuable (to the user).
Google also says that they don’t do anything to search results related to Foundem but Foundem simply has done a bad job at optimizing their website for search engines (SEO).
Ciao, on the other hand, has always had quite a good relationship with Google and even used their AdSense program. But when Ciao was taken over by Microsoft, they started complaining how Google did business, first to the German Bundeskartellamt and later to Bruxelles.
Google doesn’t believe they have done anything wrong and they don’t do anything to harm their competitors or their customers.
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Does not sound like they’ll get anywhere.
I am curious when all the google-ads and commecial pollution of search results will be the end of google? Not unlike Yahoo 10 years ago.
Jens