Google's attempt to cuddle up to Yahoo! after the fall out from Microsoft's failed takeover bid may hit the buffers after news emerged that EU officials have taken it upon themselves to investigate a potential link up between Google and Yahoo!. This was despite the two companies claiming that the deal will only go ahead in the US and Canada (should US anti-trust regulators greenlight the pact). UK digital practitioners shouldn't be too concerned however. Google's dominance of the UK market is more than other major markets, meaning that any attempt to push a deal through on these shores would most likely fail.
Interest from regulators must surely be giving Google boffins sore heads by now. In response to an EU article on data protection issues, Peter Fleischer, global privacy counsel at Google, drafted an exhilarating 10,347-word document outlining Google's view on privacy. Highlights include: 'We're constantly experimenting with our algorithm to come up with more relevant and useful results for our users. But in order to come up with new ranking techniques we have to store and analyse search logs. If we don't keep a history, we have no good way to evaluate our progress and make improvements.' So, in short, no search logs = no Google. No wonder the document was so long.
News reaches us from stateside about the sorry case of Sourcetool.com, a business directory with a revenue model entirely dependent on Google. Sourcetool managed to get huge volumes of traffic clicking on its ads by spending up to $500,000 (£273,000) a month bidding on keywords. But it claims Google upped the minimum amount Sourcetool was required to bid, meaning the website disappeared from Google's sponsored links. Founder Don Savage has posted a 4,000-word letter to the US Department of Justice explaining how Google allegedly pulled the plug on his business. But how many times have you been annoyed by poor quality sites dominating the search listings? Maybe Google was right on this one.
WORLD DOMINANCE UPDATE
Google now accounts for 81.4 per cent of searches in India (comScore). Yahoo! has a 9.4% market share. One area where Yahoo! is fighting head to head with Google is mobile search. Yahoo! achieved a small victory by signing a deal with Australian network Telstra to provide search services.