French search company 1PlusV has added to the European dogpile on Google, accusing the search giant of keeping the little guys down when it comes to advertising on AdSense. 1PlusV says it has filed a new complaint with the European Commission to supplement an earlier complaint against Google. The Commission says it plans to give Google a chance to respond before moving forward.
1PlusV is behind the legal search engine Ejustice.fr, and says that Google won't allow the site to use AdSense to make money. The decision "impedes the development of efficient vertical search engines," 1PlusV attorney Marie-C�cile Rameau said on Tuesday, adding that Google seems to be preventing consumers from accessing more search options as well.
The latter part of Rameau's statement is a reference to 1PlusV's earlier complaint against Google, filed almost exactly one year ago. At the time, the company had joined price comparison site Foundem and the now-Microsoft-owned Ciao! from Bing in accusing Google of limiting the success of the competition by keeping their Google search rankings low.
The companies collectively accused Google of doing this on an algorithmic level, but Google defended itself by saying that these sites aggregate third-party content and don't offer the kind of original content that Google claims is important in its search rankings. Users want to find pages that offer useful information, Google said, not pages that collect hundreds of outbound links so that users have to do more hunting and clicking.
The European Commission announced in November that it had opened a formal antitrust investigation over those accusations, and now 1PlusV wants to add to the pile. The company didn't specify exactly how Google is preventing it from using AdSense, but it's possible that Google is restricting 1PlusV's use of certain keywords.
Google hasn't specifically addressed the latest complaints from 1PlusV, but did say in a statement that it was working "closely with the European Commission to explain many different parts of our business."
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