Google faces US competition inquiry
Google has been accused of manipulating its rivals’ myTriggers, SourceTool/TradeComet and Foundem search rankings.
Regulators in Texas have launched the first broad anti-trust review of Google’s search and advertising practices in the US.
While federal regulators in Washington have investigated the impact on competition of Google’s business deals in the past, Greg Abbott, Texas attorney general, is the first regulator to look more broadly at its core search business, amid growing concerns about the power the online business wields.
In the Texas case, Google said in a blog post on Friday that it had been asked for information about three different firms that have raised complaints against it.
The three – myTriggers and SourceTool/TradeComet in the US, and Foundem in the UK – have accused Google of reducing their traffic by pushing them down its search rankings.
“The important thing to remember is that we built Google to provide the most useful, relevant search results and ads for users. In other words, our focus is on users, not websites. Given that not every website can be at the top of the results, or even appear on the first page of our results, it’s unsurprising that some less relevant, lower-quality websites will be unhappy with their ranking.”
He added that companies such as Amazon, Shopping.com and Expedia typically rank high in Google’s search results “because of the quality of the service they offer users”.
The company has faced a flurry of legal challenges and lost a copyright case in Germany against its YouTube business.
It also paid $8.5m to settle a class action lawsuit in the US over alleged privacy violations at its Buzz social networking service. It also faces a lawsuit from software company Oracle, which accuses Google of patent infringement with the Android mobile operating system and officials in Brussels have also raised the prospect of a possible inquiry into anti-competitive behaviour by Google.
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