In a press statement on Tuesday, the EU said it was acting on complaints by certain “search service providers” that their services had received unfavourable treatment in Google’s unpaid and sponsored search results. Additional allegations concerned Google’s alleged “preferential placement” of their own service.
The EU said it will investigate whether Google has “abused a dominant market position in online search by allegedly lowering the ranking of unpaid search results of competing services.”
The complainants specialize in providing online price comparisons, said the EU. They say their comparison results are unfairly ranked below Google’s results, and that this is Google ploy to “shut out competing services.”
The EU also intends to delve into allegations that Google reduced the placement of sponsored links for competing search services.
In response to an email from The Epoch Times, a Google spokesperson said, “Since we started Google we have worked hard to do the right thing by our users and our industry—ensuring that ads are always clearly marked, making it easy for users to take their data with them when they switch services and investing heavily in open source projects. But there’s always going to be room for improvement, and so we’ll be working with the Commission to address any concerns.”
Regarding the allegations concerning Google rankings, the spokesperson said Google was built for “users, not websites,” and therefore some websites will be unhappy with where they are ranked.
“Those sites have complained and even sued us over the years, but in all cases there were compelling reasons why their sites were ranked poorly by our algorithms,” explained the spokesperson.“Google has never taken action to intentionally hurt competing services.”
Google says that as part of their efforts to give users more meaningful results, for certain queries results are displayed differently from the usual “ten blue links” format.
“For consumers searching on Google for specific queries like ‘digital camera price comparison,’ we offer product search results because we believe it’s more useful to provide a user with products and prices than just ‘ten blue links,’” the spokesperson said.
