The BBC reports that a European Investigation will be launched over complaints about Google.

EU launches antitrust probe into alleged Google abuses

The European Commission has launched an investigation into Google after other search engines complained that the firm had abused its dominant position.

The EC will examine whether the world’s largest search engine penalised competing services in its results.

The probe follows complaints by firms including price comparison site Foundem and legal search engine ejustice.fr.

What we are talking about here is search results. You enter a search on Google and ten results come up on the first page. There are often thousands and, on occasion, millions of hits. The order of these hits is vital to web site success. If you are selling something, for instance, like coffee and your search result puts you at 213, you’re not going to sell very much coffee.

Google’s competitors are alleging that the company manipulates its search results to make competitors, well, less competitive. They allege that their place in the hierarchy, say fifteenth in a search, would be seventh if the “real” results were posted.

This is the kind of problem you can expect with a company that controls a very large part of the market and has components that compete with other companies that use the Internet.

James Pilant