Google whacked
A Labour MP has attacked Google's ‘search monopoly', claiming the search giant could damage British business by using anti-competitive tactics.
The Labour MP for Hyndburn, Graham Jones reportedly launched his attack in a Westminster Hall debate, where he urged the Government to take action against Google, PC Pro reported.
He reportedly said: "Google has gone from being a competitor to a predator and from a horizontal organic search client to a monopoly giant, with subliminal and unclear sponsored searches that favour other Google products.
"Without search neutrality rules to constrain Google's competitive advantage, we may be heading toward a bleakly uniform world of Google everything," he added.
Google is reportedly already facing a probe into its search practices in the EU, which will decide whether it thinks Google is doctoring its search results for its own gain. The search company also attracted attention to itself this week by bowing to pressure from the entertainment industry bodies to censor some ‘piracy-related' search terms.
Hyndburn claimed that British companies have been adversely affected by Google's market power, which he believes accounts for 90 percent of searches.
"There are suggestions that Google's search results are influenced by advertising and even that Google's technology might deliberately lower the visibility of rival sites," he reportedly said.
As an example of the problem, Hyndburn apparently cited the preferential placement of Google's price comparison service, which, he claimed caused traffic to the UK's most successful comparison sites to fall by over 40 percent over 2 years.
"That is a marked contrast, but more marked is the fact that traffic to Google's price comparison site rose by 125% during the same period," he reportedly said.
Hyndburn also apparently claimed that the preferential placement of Google Maps on the search engine was responsible for lowering the amount of traffic to the UK's two leading mapping services, Multimap and Streetmap.
His figures also reportedly showed that UK property portal RightMove lost 10 percent of its market value upon rumours that Google was planning its own UK house search service.
Interestingly culture minister Ed Vaizey apparently suggest the problem wasn't such a big deal, adding that he believed the internet should work according to market forces instead of heavy regulation and that there are 177 search engines in the UK market so consumers have a choice.
