Google Denies Rankings Hanky-Panky as EU Pursues Probe by Erika Morphy

The European Commission has opened an antitrust probe of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) for allegedly discriminating against competing search services by restricting its advertising partners from placing ads on their sites. It also is investigating whether Google has restricted advertisers from moving their data to competing ad services.

It is one of the broadest regulatory investigations into Google ever, and it was triggered by complaints earlier this year that Google was deliberately keeping certain websites' rankings low in search results.
In February, the European Commission notified Google that it received complaints from a UK price comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine, ejustice.fr, and Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) Ciao from Bing. In the meantime Google said the allegations are not true.


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