Legal bruiser Reback joins Google battle in Europe

Using it myself, great piece of software.

Now it's up to the others to up their games and not sit on their laurels. This guy would be better chaging his focus on the Microsoft/Apple patent trolling to fund his regime

Lousy comparison sites

Perhaps most of those 3,500 guinea pigs had clicked on Kelkoo, Pricerunner or Bizrate links before, and therefore had a very clear opinion of just how useful they'd find those "results" this time around.

What a surprise

An american lawyer paid by Microsoft says that the EU is not nasty enough to Google.

I also trust Google more than Pricerunner, Bizrate or Kelkoo to find the best deals (hint: select order by price low to high).

Microsoft does not like the fact that its search (Bing) is far worse than Google search and people know it.

That distribution looks all right to me

I have long stopped using any of the "competition" listed on that slide. While this may be specific to the goods I search for, their search result used to yield 90%+ duds (stuff that is no longer in stock or at same price) and/or false positives. Compared to that, Google usually hits the >50% range.

On top of that they used link spam to fill the first 2-3 pages of any search result term (regardless of how irrelevant).

They definitely will not be missed, even if all of them go under.

By the way, this does not mean that Google should not be subjected to antitrust controls - that is a given and mandated by Eu law after you gain "significant market power". Google has had that for a while now and has managed to get away with it for too long.

ooh ooh Google's the best anyway

why would anybody go elsewhere, google should be the only entity on the planet ooh ooh

Thought I'd get in first before the usual suspects start spouting garbage.

complainants did it to themselves

I still say the complainants did it to themselves. Faced with the stark reality that in a fair search market the best product would win, they played for advantage rather than fairness or proportionate measures to preserve competition.

But they never stopped to think about who would actually benefit from rigging the competition, always assuming it would be themselves. Turns out if you let a group of scum that think SEO is more effective than building better product, it's whoever they attack that benefits!

'"English English” is an official EU language - but Californian English isn’t. Google doesn’t seem bothered by the distinction.'

-ize would follow Oxford (or Oxford English Dictionary) English - rather than the unfortunate rather Francophile bastardization we use these days (CUP may choose what it will). The irony of much of its current usage being due to the power and influence of a minority - whilst being used in the manner it has in an article about Google must surely not have escaped you Andrew ;)