Another group of Google rival companies (separate from FairSearch) has sprung up with a new site aimed at shaping the EU opinion on Google’s business practices when it comes to competition.
The site is called “Focus on the User,” and the companies/organizations involved are: Yelp, Consumer Watchdog, Jameda, HolidayCheck, TripAdvisor, and Fight for the Future.
Here’s an excerpt from the info you’ll be fed on this site:
You might think that Google gives you the best answers from across the web when you search for something as important as a pediatrician in Munich, a bicycle repair shop in Copenhagen, or a hotel in Madrid. But Google doesn’t actually use its normal organic search algorithm to produce the responses to this question that you see prominently on the first screen. Instead, it promotes a more limited set of results drawn from Google+ ahead of the more relevant ones you would get from using Google’s organic search algorithm.
The European Commission is weighing its options to ensure that consumers searching using Google can access all websites, not just content powered by Google+. We think the best way to do that is using Google’s own organic search algorithm to identify the most relevant results — regardless of their source — from across the web.
So it’s pretty much stuff you’ve heard before,but don’t worry, it goes on and on from there. This time they have a “tool” to demonstrate their point.
In our internal testing, it looks like searches for “yelp” and “tripadvisor” do return results for those respecitve sites and their respective apps.
Via Re/code
Image via Focus on the User