Google has denied it promotes its own websites and services over others.
Eric Schmidt told US Senate the company is not 'cooking' anything
Executive chairman Eric Schmidt told a US Senate hearing: "May I simply say that I can assure you we're not cooking anything."
The Senate Judiciary subcommittee on anti-trust is currently seeking to establish whether the search engine is abusing its position in the market and subsequently hampering competition.
"Google does nothing to block access to any of the competitors and other sources of information," Schmidt said.
"Google is focused on delivering the best search results, not driving business to its services."
Consumer review site Yelp and comparison shopping site Nextag told the hearing Google's search practices were hurting their businesses. However, Schmidt denied this was true.
"Most of these complaints come from websites that don't like where their sites rank on Google's search results page or argue that in providing better answers like maps, shopping, or local results, we are hurting individual sites," Schmidt said.
"If consumers don't like what one website is providing them, they can switch to another website with just one click."
The Senate hearing comes three months after the US Federal Trades Commission (TFTC) launched an investigation into whether Google's search results steer web users to the firms service rather that those from rival companies.
Furthermore, the European Commission launched an investigation into the search engine last year after three complainants accused it of demoting rival sites in search results and giving preference to its own services. British price comparison site Foundem and French legal search engine ejustice.fr are behind complaints to the commission about "unfavourable treatment of their services in Google's unpaid and sponsored search results coupled with an alleged preferential placement of Google's own services".
Comments
Matt Egan said: Well without knowing the domain in question its difficult to say but in my experience Google Search is only about content Itd be lovely to think that we got all referrals for PC Advice with no effort but Google ranks content not domains Its not perfect and its frustrating because there is know communication but it is fair And if I could proffer some advice it would be this choose what search terms you want to rank for and that may not be your domain name and write lots of interlinked content about itthem Content is king relevance is queen
Stephen Matthews said: In a logical world - yes as it is nearer my search term As I said its not down to logic but money If youre looking for a site for say Bloggs Ltd you would not expect www bloggscouk to be on page 10In my opinion thats not a search engine thats a paid for listing
Matt Egan said: Hi Stephen That does depend on your company name doesnt it If it is a regular term domain names would become hugely expensive Should the owner of laptop-reviewscom automatically rank higher than PCAdvisorcouk for the term laptop reviews
Stephen Matthews said: You would expect if you type in the name of a company thatan intelligent search engine would check the name against com couk etc first but not googleIf I type in my company name it comes up on page 10 and my website is just the companycoukGoogle search engine - intelligent Only at making money