Google reconoció en su blog oficial que Bruselas le ha notificado de una denuncia por parte de tres compañías europeas, entre ellas una filial de Microsoft, que le acusan de competencia desleal. Y así dice la noticia. No es una investigación formal, pero es una investigación al fin y al cabo. Tres fueron los denunciantes: Foundem, una empresa británica de compras on-line; ejustice.fr, un buscador francés de temas jurídicos, y Ciao, filial de Microsoft. Google dice que Bruselas le pidió información sobre estas denuncias. "No nos sorprende que nos pregunten sobre el rol que tenemos en los sectores de publicidad y sobre la competencia. Sin embargo, siempre hemos trabajado de una manera correcta", dice la empresa.
Julia Holtz, asesora de Competencia de la compañía, dice en el blog que entienden lo importante que son los ránkings para las páginas, especialmente las comerciales, y que son los primeros en admitir que nuestro buscador no es perfecto. "Imágínese tener que ubicar 272 millones de posibles resultados para una búsqueda tan popular como iPod en pocos segundos. Es el reto que enfrentamos todos los días", dice.
La compañía agrega: "El objetivo del ránking es darle a la gente lo más útil y no tenemos nada en contra de los buscadores verticales. De hecho Moneysupermarket.com, Opodo y Expedia usualmente están arriba en las búsqueda.
En el blog de Google:
Committed to competing fairly
Wednesday, February 24, 2010 | 1:31 AM
Labels: Competition
"The European Commission has notified us that it has received complaints from three companies: a UK price comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine called ejustice.fr, and Microsoft's Ciao! from Bing. While we will be providing feedback and additional information on these complaints, we are confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners, as well as in line with European competition law.
Given that these complaints will generate interest in the media, we wanted to provide some background to them. First, search. Foundem - a member of an organisation called ICOMP which is funded partly by Microsoft - argues that our algorithms demote their site in our results because they are a vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google. ejustice.fr's complaint seems to echo these concerns.
We understand how important rankings can be to websites, especially commercial ones, because a higher ranking typically drives higher volumes of traffic. We are also the first to admit that 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.
Our algorithms aim to rank first what people are most likely to find useful and we have nothing against vertical search sites -- indeed many vertical search engines like Moneysupermarket.com, Opodo and Expedia typically rank high in Google's results. For more information on this issue check out our guidelines for webmasters and advertisers, and for an independent analysis of Foundem's ranking issues please read this report by Econsultancy"
