Beforehand, world’s biggest search engine Google has faced complaints on much smaller scale. Some complained about their mode of acquisition, while others made some small acquisitions. But this time, the complaint seems to be a bit serious. Three search engine companies of Europe have lodged a complaint with the European officials claiming that Google, due to its massive size of the business, tries to squelch the online rivals.Judging the way by which investigations are proceeding, it seemed that the EU officials are looking at the entire forest and also at the smaller trees. The main complaint that has been made against Google is that they were trying to rig search results from those competitor companies and they were doing to favor their own services.
Google has confirmed that the European officials had contacted them based on a complaint by three companies. These companies are Foundem, Ejustice and Ciao. Foundem is a reputed price comparison site from Britain. Ejustice is law search engine from France and Ciao is a product rating website from the house of Microsoft Corporation.
It has also been reported that presence of Google is more in the European market than in the USA market. Google has a search engine market share of 66% in the US market and 77% in the European market. Google has reacted by saying that they always try to protect the interest of the users of the search engine, but not any particular website.
In the year 2008, Google wanted to make an advertising deal with Yahoo Inc., but backed out when US officials said that they are going to challenge the acquisition of the deal on the ground of antitrust.
