Surprise! Google accused of abusing monopoly

As an admirer of a lot of what Google does, it’s with mixed feelings (amusement and schadenfreude) that we read of its latest travails.

The EU, that bastion of free market economics, has launched an anti-trust investigation over the allegation by two shopping comparison sites (one owned by Microsoft, paragons of free market competition) that Google has been applying a penalty to their pages so that they don’t rank well in Google’s natural search results.

What’s more, they allege that by displaying its own ‘Shopping Results’ against a product search, Google is abusing its UK market position which is claimed to be circa 90%.

Google didn’t see fit to put up a spokesman for the item on Radio 4’s Today programme and you can see why.  Unnamed company sources say that the shopping channels concerned have little ‘original content’. Whereas Google’s shopping Results are pregnant with insight, wit and revelation.

It’s irrelevant that Google doesn’t charge merchants who list their products in its Shopping Results for any click-throughs. Either show all product listings or none. You can’t have it both ways.

QUESTION: How can you get to page one of Google for a keyword that’s got 270 million competing pages?

ANSWER: Get into Google News.

Last year we launched a 100% ‘green’ web hosting service. This means you could be certain that the energy used to power the server on which your website sits is powered 100% by wind, sun and rain. The only way we could do this was by acquiring a dedicated server based offshore - in this instance, in California. UK alternative sources of energy are still too unreliable to guarantee 100% ‘green’.

Our problem was that keywords like ‘green hosting’ and ‘google green’ have respectively, nearly 80 million and 270 million competing pages. Getting a top ranking would be tough.

Then we remembered that Google  uses a website’s international IP address as one of its geographic ranking factors. In other words, if a site is hosted outside of the country in which it wants to be found, a UK site hosted in the US for example, Google would regard it as less relevant than a site hosted in the UK. It would therefore give the site hosted outside the UK a lower ranking in its UK search results.  So we emailed Google to ask whether they’d reconsider this policy for sites hosted on servers powered 100% by alternative energy.

Answer came there none which suprised us as Google likes to make a big thing about its eco creds. It’s even getting into the green energy business.

So last week we issued a press release about Google’s apparent confusion.

The result was that today we’re on the first page of Google for ‘green hosting’, ‘google green’ and other related key-phrases. That’s because Google shows results from Google news on its first page and bless their cotton socks, they haven’t penalised us for having the audacity to question their policy.

The moral of the story is that if you can find a newsworthy angle, you can beat the competition provided you know how to optimise your press release for Google and the other search engines.

There are many ways to wreck a brand - Toyota’s been doing its best recently and history is full of examples.

I played a part in wrecking the Haig Scotch Whisky brand myself so I speak with some authority - for a change. That was a price positioning mistake - too cheap in a sector where image is vital.

But Google’s crassness in revealing people’s contacts when it launched its Buzz Twitterlite service last week is so arrogant, so irresponsible and so stupid that it’s got to be a classic.

In case you haven’t heard, Google launched Buzz to users of its Gmail service and just to help people get started, (because Google’s like that, it really wants to help), its default was to show some of the people that a user mails most frequently on the user’s contacts. As invasions of privacy go, this is top of the Premiership.

Suppose you’re a dissident in a country like Burma, North Korea or Iran and you use Gmail. How long before the secret police come knocking at your comrades’ doors?

When a company puts commercial gain before its values (er, anyone remember ‘don’t do evil’), it’s usually heading for trouble. And when it copies other company’s products with inferior imitations and uses its market dominance aggressively, it’s supposed to be called Microsoft, not Google.

The rot started when the company put shareholder interests before its ideals and signed a pact with the devil in China.

Somebody at the Googleplex needs to get a grip. They’ve undone the default but the damage is done.