- Tuesday, 10 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like - Abraham Lincoln
Google abused us, say search minnows
Nibble
Anticompetitive claim
Wednesday, 18 February 2009, 18:45
A SMALL SEARCH engine outfit claims Google illegally rigs its prices to kill off competitors.
TradeComet.com, which owns SourceTool, said Google abuses its might in the marketplace by making it too expensive for competition to use its services.
TradeComet said its traffic plunged by 90 percent after Google imposed its new pricing terms n the outfit, it claims.
In a press release, TradeComet said Google raised the minimum bids on some of its ads so that words that had resulted in advertising costs of 5 cents and 10 cents per click were upped to $5 and $10 per click and traffic plunged. µ
L'INQ
AP
Share this:
Share
Advertisement
Subscribe to the INQ Newsletter
Sign-up for the INQBot weekly newsletter
INQ Whitepapers
Business Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Jobs
Advertisement
INQ Poll
does this make Google the new Vole?
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Give me a break. This isn't a "search minnow" being "abused" by Google's search engine, this is some specialized B2B search engine site that makes its money via AdWords.
Google can price *their own service* however they want, and if that means raising the price of ads because a market is becoming more lucrative, so be it. It will just make other competitor search engines like MSN and Yahoo more attractive. In that Sourcetool's case, they're just using Google's ads, so it's not like it's going to matter if they switch providers.
These chump companies need to diversify their operations anyway. Relying on one source is just opening you up to problems when the playing field changes.