Ever since Google decided to become a destination and not only a means to search for your desired one, a lot of websites started losing visitors. As a result, they were accused of favoring their own services in search results through their platform.
The strategy behind Google's move seems clear: the more time people spend in their own pages, the more money they can make out of ads. Therefore, redirecting customers to competing websites - when they could offer simple services themselves - seemed counter-intuitive to increase revenues.
In order to fight such an unfair competition in search results, some companies joined a group called FairSearch, which fights to change Goggle's search engine so that all the websites compete under the same conditions. Companies like Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle have been collecting evidence of this distortion in Google's search engine to then go to the responsible competition authority in each country and press them for changes.
This week, the European proponents of the group just won their first battle. Goggle offered concessions to their engine in order to compete in fair terms in Europe, after being threatened with a USD5 Bi fine. The proposed changes have been approved and are believed to help level the search results.
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