The European Commission has acknowledged receipt of three antitrust complaints against Google. It did not identify the companies and said it had not started a formal investigation.
The Commission can confirm that it has received three complaints against Google which it is examining. The Commission has not opened a formal investigation for the time being, an unidentified E.U. executive said in a statement on Wednesday.
The European Union Commission is located in Brussels, Belgium. Photo courtesy Wikimedia.
Google claims it has done nothing wrong, and disclosed that British price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine eJustice.fr and Microsoft-owned Ciao from Bing were the complainants.
This is the beginning of an inquiry, in all likelihood it will not go anywhere. The Commission has not expressed any hint of guilt, Google senior competition counsel Julia Holtz told reporters on a conference call, according to Reuters.
By Google's account, eJustice.fr and Foundem, which has ties to Microsoft, disagree with the low ranking Google”s search algorithm assigns their websites, which causes them to show up too low in users search results. Google says the companies accuse it of wielding its dominance as a search engine to squelch competition by preventing people from finding their vertical search engines (vertical because they specialize in the specific areas of price comparison and legal issues).
In response to those allegations, Google patted itself on the back by acknowledging how important rankings can be to websites, especially commercial ones and highlighting the enormity of the task of ranking hundreds of millions of search results in under a second.
So, why aren't these vertical search engines ranked higher? According to Google, that's because they simply aren't very good.
The Commission can confirm that it has received three complaints against Google which it is examining. The Commission has not opened a formal investigation for the time being, an unidentified E.U. executive said in a statement on Wednesday.
The European Union Commission is located in Brussels, Belgium. Photo courtesy Wikimedia.
Google claims it has done nothing wrong, and disclosed that British price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine eJustice.fr and Microsoft-owned Ciao from Bing were the complainants.
This is the beginning of an inquiry, in all likelihood it will not go anywhere. The Commission has not expressed any hint of guilt, Google senior competition counsel Julia Holtz told reporters on a conference call, according to Reuters.
By Google's account, eJustice.fr and Foundem, which has ties to Microsoft, disagree with the low ranking Google”s search algorithm assigns their websites, which causes them to show up too low in users search results. Google says the companies accuse it of wielding its dominance as a search engine to squelch competition by preventing people from finding their vertical search engines (vertical because they specialize in the specific areas of price comparison and legal issues).
In response to those allegations, Google patted itself on the back by acknowledging how important rankings can be to websites, especially commercial ones and highlighting the enormity of the task of ranking hundreds of millions of search results in under a second.
So, why aren't these vertical search engines ranked higher? According to Google, that's because they simply aren't very good.
