News In Focus
24 February 2010
European Commission investigating complaints against Google
Google has announced that the European Commission is looking into complaints about the company’s behaviour.
In a statement on Google’s blog site, the company’s senior competition lawyer, Julia Holtz, said the complaints were made by the UK price comparison site Foundem, the French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and Microsoft-owned Ciao!
She said the internet giant was confident it operated within European competition law.
Ms Holtz said Foundem claimed that its site was demoted in Google's search results, because it was a “vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google". She added that ejustice.fr's complaint seemed to echo these concerns.
“Our algorithms aim to rank first what people are most likely to find useful and we have nothing against vertical search sites – indeed many vertical search engines like Moneysupermarket.com, Opodo and Expedia typically rank high in Google's results,” she said. “We understand how important rankings can be to websites… because a higher ranking typically drives higher volumes of traffic. We are also the first to admit that our search is not perfect, but it's a very hard computer science problem to crack.”
The complaint regarding Ciao!, which Microsoft initially took to German competition authorities in 2008 and has now been transferred to Brussels, concerns Google's standard terms and conditions.
Ms Holtz said that while each case raised slightly different issues, “the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners. This is not the case".
Click here to read the full Google statement.