In the Industry of Internet, a high page rank is the main concern for web site owners because it drives more traffic to their site and means more income and popularity. Now this has been the reason why three European-based Internet companies have filed complaint against Google to the European Commission.
The three companies who filed their complaints are Foundem(a U.K. price comparison site), EJustice.fr ( a French site for legal search inquiries) and Ciao (which is now called Ciao Bing is the Microsoft-owned German shopping site). All three companies reportedly accused Google of hampering their business.
An Antitrust examination for Google is now underway but definitely not a formal investigation. The European Commission had informed Google of these complaints and asked it to comment on the accusations .
In a statement issued by Google on Wednesday( in compliance with what the EU Commission has asked of it),the company said that “It’s natural for competition officials to look at online advertising given how important it is to the development of the Internet and the dominance of one player,”
Microsoft is a known competitor of Google so naturally, Google has blamed it for initiating such controversy. It is obvious how Microsoft was involved in this issue. Ciao Bing is a German shopping site owned by Microsoft while the Foundem company is a member of a trade group called iComp, which is largely funded by Microsoft. Foundem has protested mainly about their website dropping down in terms of page ranking in Google searches, they allegedly argue that they are blacklisted from Google because they are known competitors. But in December, the UK price comparison website’s rank was restored to its previous high page rank.
Google’s top antitrust lawyer Julia Holtz explains that the algorithms used by Google is dependent on the user inquiries. These computer programs in truth are written by the programmers but are matched as close as possible to what the user is searching. The same procedure is followed by other search engines. Regarding Foundem’s accusations, Holt said that their company does not blacklist certain pages or otherwise.
Foundem returned to its high rank due to the changes it made on its website. But Holtz did not clearly explained the drop in Foundem’s rank. She only aid that Google creates about 400 alterations to its algorithm per year to assure that spammers will not get the better of their search engine and receive a high page rank even though their sites do not really address the inquiries of the users. She added that page rank is influenced by the search words used by the user. There are roughly 200 signals contributing to how pages are ranked in addition to the references from other websites.
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Tags: ciao bing, ciao bing blacklisted, eu antitrust investigation, google, google on court, Web news
