Foundem, a comparison search website that helped initiate a large-scale European Union anti-trust investigation against Google, has filed a lawsuit against Google, according to court papers filed in October and released this week, Bloomberg reported.
The lawsuit, filed in the UK, seeks to reclaim lost revenue as a result of Google’s alleged anti-competitive conduct – namely, returning Foundem’s website lower in Google’s search results than it used to, costing the vertical search site valuable traffic. Because, you know, if your website doesn’t rank, and your business model depends on a third-party to survive, obviously Google is wrong.
Foundem’s lawsuit argues that Google’s reasoning for demoting its rankings (lack of original content) is unfair because a lack of original content is an “inherent characteristic of all search services.” It also pointed to the fact that Google now offers its own comparison shopping search option.
Not mentioned in the lawsuit as far as I can tell: Foundem’s SEO issues, which are likely the true reason its search rankings dropped.
Google’s share of the UK search market as of October was just under 90 percent, according to Experian Hitwise.