FollowA new lawsuit was recently filed by Foundem, a British shopping comparison
website against Google, claiming that Google’s unfair low ranking of Foundem’s
links in their search pages caused them a significant loss of revenue. Just
last week, Google was cleared of similar charges by the US Federal Trade
Corporation, so this is a new attack in the same direction. Previously as well,
Foundem has put similar allegations against Google, when they motivated an anti
trust investigation by the European Union in 2010. The EU is still considering its
decision on that matter, despite Google being cleared by American authorities in a
similar lawsuit.
The US Federal Trade Corporation basically let Google go with a warning, since
they weren’t able to find much evidence that Google was manipulating its search
algorithms to generate results that would push down competitor’s websites in
the rankings and make their own website more popular. Media leaks during the
FTC’s investigation complicated the matter, with some claiming that it might have
affected the final decision that was made on January 3 this year. This investigation
was started in 2011 at the prompting of companies like Microsoft, Expedia, Trip
Advisor etc. who made similar claims about Google manipulating search results to
keep competitors at a disadvantage.
Now, Google faces this new allegation by Foundem in the UK along with the
existing lawsuits being overseen by the EU. The European Union law may not let
Google off as easily as the Americans did and Google might end up having to pay
significant damages or undertake changes in its business practices that could affect
the website’s popularity. It remains to be seen how this new lawsuit will proceed,
but all this negative publicity can’t be good for Google’s reputation as the world’s
largest and most trustworthy search engine.
