The European Commission has begun a probe into the popular search engine company Google, for allegedly breaking competition and anti-trust laws.

Foundem (a price comparison site), ejustice.fr (a French legal search engine), and Microsoft have accused Google of adjusting their search engine in order to rank the three companies lower on their results pages, despite the belief of the three companies that their sites should be ranked higher.

According to a Google spokesperson, the web giants intend to cooperate with the investigation, as they feel no criminal actions have been made: “we are confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners, as well as in line with European competition law.”

In a series of blog posts, Google has dismissed these accusations as an result of their enormous success, stating that several vertical search engines, such as Expedia and Obodo, still rank high in their search results.

Google hope to win sympathy with their users by posting a series of blogs explaining their side, however, they are unlikely to win their desired sympathy due to the nature of their posts: “Our search is not perfect, but it’s a very hard computer science problem to crack. Imagine having to rank the 272 million possible results for a popular query like the iPod on a 14 by 12 screen computer screen in just a few milliseconds. It’s a challenge we face millions of times each day.” Comments such as these are unlikely to work in their favour.


Written by: Robert, who runs a website about SEO