Shopping site makes complaint against Google

Google faces an anti-trust complaint at the European Commission after a French shopping-comparison website said the world’s largest search engine may have abused a dominant position.

Bastien Duclaux, Paris-based Twenga’s chief executive, said Google’s services “should not benefit from any privileged treatment” in its search rankings.

He said Google updates since late 2010 have demoted Twenga in favour of Google’s own shopping comparison service.

The EU is investigating Google over claims it discriminated against other services in its search results and stopped some websites from accepting rival ads.

Microsoft and another shopping comparison site, Foundem, are among companies that asked the agency to examine Google.

The commission received the complaint from Twenga yesterday, spokesman Antoine Colombani said in Brussels.

Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, declined to comment.

Google has “applied several algorithms last year and very recently in order to penalise these kind of products in the search results”, Mr Duclaux said.

“Twenga lost more than 30% of its audience during the course of August.”

He said Google may also tweak the so-called quality score of websites to demote rival advertising platforms.

The score helps set ad prices for the AdWords advertising program.

Google said in February that updates to the search engine were intended to favour “high-quality sites” with “original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on”.

— Bloomberg