French back Google monopoly complaint

A French vertical search specialist has filed a fresh complaint against Google alleging the search and advertising behemoth is abusing its dominant position. 1plusV, the company behind ejustice.fr and other search sites, filed a complaint along with UK shopping comparison site Foundem and Ciao - a German shopping site backed …

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get this one

Is it really about competition law or a multi-pronged attempt to get Google's business model revealed?

The only commentary I've found has been from, as Hattie Harperson would have it, the 'Court of public opinion'. I haven't found any legal insight anywhere. Anyone?

[Ryan Robinson]

Use Google adhere to their rules

"The companies complained that Google was unfairly tweaking search results in order to favour its own services and sites."

If you use a free service such as Google Search, expect to see them favor their own services ahead of yours. Do you own the crawler? No, Google does.

If your business relies solely on Google Search, you need to re-think your advertising model.

[Richard 120]

I thought this was about abuse of a monopoly

Like when Microsoft tried to force everyone to use IE, you could have chosen not to use the MS OS, but that was more expensive than to just use IE.

You could choose not to use google, but then you don't appear on the worlds no.1 search engine.

If google decide to move into your line of business and bumped you down their search results you lose business, it doesn't matter whether you're better, cheaper or whatever.

Their monopoly on search was home grown so I don't begrudge them that, but it shouldn't be able to be used to gain a monopoly in other markets.

[Owen Carter]

Eh?

"You could choose not to use google, but then you don't appear on the worlds no.1 search engine."

Sorry man, you appear to be confused.. what the hell does that mean.. How do you define 'using' Google? Because If I 'use' google I am searching with it.. not trying to appear in its results.

(And of course if I wish to use a competitor I type 'bing.com' which is fewer keypresses, and the effective default on Windows. It' s not like I have to 'buy' Google everytime I buy a new computer, quite the reverse.)

This does not, of course, have anything to do with whether my own sites appear in Googles indexing.. That is something I control myself by 1) helping them to index me with an accurate sitemap, 2) having relevant spam-free content that shows up in searches.

So Mate.. when you say you 'use' Google, you are really mean that you use them as a cheapo advertising service and not as a search service, don't you? And you fail in that too I, suspect..

[Richard 120]

Use Google

You think websites appear on google just by chance?

http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?continue=/addurl

The issue is when you attain a level of recognition through google and other websites, through word of mouth, other advertising and just generally performing better than the alternatives. Your ranking grows to number one on the google website.

The google decide to move into your market and suddenly you find that regardless of their capability or price your customer base drops and they are suddenly the market leader, meanwhile your revenues force you into administration.

You can live with the advertised services because it's clear they are adverts, but when the results are simply modified by the Mountain View Chocolate factory you have no way of competing.

[gerryg]

it's not about monopoly it's about abuse of a dominant position

I have no idea (and to the best of my observations I'm not alone) whether Google are abusing anything. That they are good at what they do is not an abuse of a dominant position, rather it's how they became to be dominant.

I have read somewhere that they down rate sites that just list links that might or might not be relevant.

For example I when I have search for "brand x graphics card review" I'm trying to get to one of those hardware review websites without searching for the right page in that website. I'm not looking for one of those "shopping" websites that parrot back the product and say "read reviews here" (in the early days of this I used to look and discover an invitation to be the first to review the product - great.)

As someone searching for a product Google's down rating (if it occurs) of such sites feels good to me, I imagine that as an honest seller with good rep, advertiser or keyword buyer on Google, that feels good to them too

I have no idea if that is abuse, from over here it feels like customer service.

[JaitcH]

So a failing Frog search engine and another German proxy for Microsoft are complaining?

Sort of obvious why.

Microsoft hasn't had a success with Bling, or whatever, the Frogs never really got it right so they all turn around and blame Google.

What a pile of horse droppings; and a waste of taxpayers money!

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to add a complaint to this law suit

I went into Tesco the other day and was UTTERLY appauled by the fact that they are blatentatly advertising the stuff they sell in their own store. While I'm at it why do you never see adverts for Top Gear subscriptions in AutoCar? it's a bloody monoply I tell you and something must be done to protect the children.

[Anonymous Coward]

meanhwhile in California

Google are trying to crowd-source their blacklist. However, I think they're being too polite about it. They have done a lot of work to make mouse-over preview work (not exactly the right word), but how much would it take to put a red X-shaped button to the left of each result, which for your current search session would make that domain/page/whatever disappear? I'd love it if I didn't have to keep adding "-site:xxxxxxx" entries into the search bar to get rid of the crap. Seriously, if enough users did this to enough sites, would there be any reason for Google to continue to index them?

That's the real question. Does Google HAVE to index a site just because it's on the Internet? Or, does Google have to index a site they've scraped just for the underlying site links?

If google blacklisted the handful of domains where these vertical search sites exist, they would not have to tweak/expose their algorhythm, since NONE of the sites' data would ever reach that algorhythm.

While I'm on a roll, what's to prevent Google from buying Websense. Forget controlling companies' outbound internet access, now they're controlling the world's internet access. So long as they leave all of the categories available to be checked/unchecked by the user/parent/[entity paying for the internet connection], I don't care how they rate sites, just give me some well defined category buttons to eliminate shit from their search results.

Ok, I'm done, thank you for reading.