£1bn lawsuit by Google Shopping rival staggers back to feet in London High Court

Google has won a legal bid to keep its “crown jewel” search ranking algorithms secret in a long-running £1bn competition lawsuit against rival shopping search engine Kelkoo. Kelkoo unsuccessfully argued in the High Court of England and Wales that it wanted to expand the number of people entitled to read confidential documents …

[elwe]

Is Kelkoo still going? I would have thought they would have gone bust by now. Maybe they have investors essentially funding this lawsuit in the hopes of a payoff.

Google shopping won out because it was free for merchants so everyone reasonably priced was on it and attempted to force merchants to include VAT and disclose shipping so it actually gave consumers meaningful results. Kelkoo and the like were useless, half the prices jumped up once VAT and shipping were included and the coverage was far from complete.

You still see some of these useless comparison sites listing themselves into Google shopping, but I think most people are like me and hit back as soon as they realise it isn't a real merchant. Generally I only end up seeing them when I am looking for something hard to find, and I have already been to the merchant they are pumping direct from google shopping and seen they don't have stock, but the useless comparison site hasn't caught up to that.

My guess is Google's tracking means they can see that these useless comparison sites aren't the search results people are looking for, so they drop them down the order, which is what Kelkoo can't admit to themselves so they imagine Google are deliberately dropping them down the order. Hopefully once this case is resolved they will go bust and disappear.

[elsergiovolador]

Monopoly

Given the Google monopolistic position, their algorithm should be publicly available and scrutinised. They should also have an option to see an explanation why particular search result ended up in such and such place.

Furthermore, Google shouldn't assume that they can just go an scrape any site just because there is a missing robots.txt file.

The scraping should only be opt in.

It would be interesting to see how much data they scraped without consent and whether such database should be made public.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Monopoly

Isn’t proving the monopolistic behaviour the essence of these cases

[gerryg]

Re: Monopoly

No it is proving abuse of a dominant position that breaks the law. A monopoly needs to demonstrate it isn't abusing its dominant position if challenged. But one way to become a monopoly is to be the best. Others won't like it but they just have to try harder.

[Dinanziame]

Re: Monopoly

The scraping should only be opt in.

That's silly. It's like saying users should ask for the consentement of websites before accessing them.

In the first place, it's even sillier to imagine that there is a website admin who knows about the existence of Google and who's unable to set up a robots.txt file. That was a standard way before Google existed.