Google to be investigated by EU

And so it begins…

It has been announced that the European Union (EU) will be launching an investigation into the Google search engine as a result of complaints received by other search engines operating within the EU citing that Google has abused its dominant position as the number one search engine .

If the allegations are proved to be true it will be a huge blow to Google and may result in the public no ‘trusting’ the search engine as they have done now for over ten years.

The allegations being investigated by an EU commission are looking into whether Google lowered the rankings of competition services within its results.

The investigation was launched subsequent to complaints by a numner of firms including price comparison site Foundem and legal search engine ejustice.fr.

The investigation is keen to point out that it does not mean that there has actually been any wrong doing by Google and a Google spokesperson said;

Since we started, Google we have worked hard to do the right thing by our users and our industry.

But there’s always going to be room for improvement, and so we’ll be working with the Commission to address any concerns.

With Google being such a large player in terms of how much business firms can do on the Internet it was inevitable that this sort of thing would happen and I am sure it will not be the last.

Google has resonded to some of the arguments launched for bad rankings and being in the industry they totally make sense. Just because you are a large corporate, successful company does not mean you have a right to top positions.

For example, Google said, Foundem “duplicates 79% of its website content from other sites.”

We all know and have known for years that duplicate content is a no, no in websites. And if there are duplicate pages there are ways to ensure only one of them counts in the search engines using canonical tags and such like.

It will be interesting to see the outcome of the investigation but I am sure it will just fizzle out as the arguments put forward appear to be more about sour grapes and bad SEO than anything else.