European Commission launches investigation on Google

The European Commission has launched an investigation against Google after three companies have complained that the search engine was penalizing their businesses.

This marks the first time that Google has been targeted by the European Union.

The Commission has written to Google, inquiring about how its search functions operate and questioned how the search engine sells its advertising space. The three companies involved are: Foundem, Ciao, and ejustice.fr.

Foundem says that Google penalized their company on its business.

“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,” explained Foundem. “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. It may not be coincidence that, collectively, these services present a nascent competitive threat to Google’s share of online advertising revenues.”

Foundem said that Google lifted the penalty last December, which led to a tremendous increase in traffic.

Google has disputed these accusations, explaining that its search algorithms aim to point people to the best sites and it does not choose favorites.

“We’ve always worked hard to ensure that our success is earned the right way, through technological innovation and great products, rather than by locking in our users or advertisers or creating artificial barriers to entry,” explained Google in a recent post.