EC sharpens long Google probe The European Commission is investigating Google to see if it has broken competition and anti-trust laws. A UK price comparison site called Foundem, a French legal search engine ejustice.fr and Microsoft have all complained that Google tweaked search results unfairly to push them further down the rankings than they should be. …
The company said: "we are confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners, as well as in line with European competition law."
Did you spot what they did there?
Tossers. The complainants are saying that Google treated their listing unfairly. As entries on a list that Google created, they are neither "users" nor "partners". So the comment has nothing to do with the complaint. In fact, with the way they deal with user's information, one could argue that the aren't operating in the interests of users. So that's another problem they've created for themselves whilst in the process of giving a non-answer.
"I didn't read that report" (Geoff Hune) does *not* mean the same as "I was not aware of the contents of that report."
People need to learn to listen to what is being said and ask themselves why lawyers, politicians and other dodgy mouthpieces either don't answer a question or answer it *very* specifically.
Google don't publish their ranking algorithms. It's going to be hard to prove they deliberately modified them as no one external knows how they work now or have worked. If you don't like their results, use Bing or Yahoo.
There is no monopoly on search, there are competitors but, for some reason, people like Google. If Bing had better results I'd use it - the interface is similar.. perhaps Microsoft need more servers (their servers are throttled with their own OS).
I am split over the Italian decision.
On one hand I like that Google has taken a massive blow for their Youtube service. On the other hand I think the Italians somehow have gotten the wrong people. Shouldn't they have been gone after the filmers and uploaders in the first place? Then again, Google could have prevented this by manually checking the content. Obviously, they don't want to do this for several reasons (manual labor being one of them).
Paris, because Rome has a Hilton Hotel, too.
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