Pressure on monopolistic players like Google is growing and Christmas is coming

“Google is our drug; the more you spend the more you get,” the founder of a travel start up in Asia, told EyeforTravel this month. Like many others, he’d like Google to wield less power, but he is also resigned to the fact that he can’t live without it.

While it’s true that there are different drugs for different markets (in China Baidu, Russia Yandex and South Korea Naver)the most recent internet statistics point to 68% of searches in the US happening on Google and 90% in Europe. Put in perspective, China’s Baidu controls just over 8% of world search, Yandex just 2%.

So, if Google is the most widely used drug, does that make it bad? Of course, not all drugs are bad. Google’s employees certainly don’t think so! Fortune Magazine recently ranked Google as the No 1 place to work in the world – for the fifth time!

Whether Google is foe or ally, good or evil is debatable, what’s indisputably true is that it dominates the world of search.

Two hoteliers recently highlighted the importance of regularly posting content to Google + which they agreed, had a ‘significant impact’ on their organic search ranking – far more significant than Facebook for example!  

Clearly, the power of great organic content can be hugely positive for hotels and quite often smaller online travel agents, as Andrew Leung, head of online marketing at Mr & Mrs Smith pointed out earlier this year. After all, who wouldn’t want to appear higher in search?

In the same article, however, Lee Stuart, director of insight at SEO firm Caliber – a Google sceptic – said that “in the ten years I’ve been in this business I’ve seen instability - with the announcement, for example, of an update to a core algorithm that affects organic rankings - created too often at certain key times of year”. 

Like Christmas. 

Clearly too much power can be bad thing. Hence a four-year investigation by the European Union antitrust authority into the search giant’s business practices. Pressure to rein Google in has come from big names like Microsoft, Yelp, and powerful German and French publishing groups that have formed a lobbying group called the Open Internet Project.

Four years is a long time but in November 2014 the European Parliament finally voted in favour of urging antitrust regulators to consider breaking up the company. From what the commentators are saying, that outcome seems unlikely but it has, at least, put pressure on the newly appointed competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, to decide whether to pursue a settlement with Google or to issue a formal charge.

That could be costly for Google, which could face a maximum fine of €6 billion or around 10% percent of its most recent annual worldwide sales. It could also see its business restricted in Europe – where Google controls 90% of the market - if it fails to rebut the charges.

The commissioner is said to have asked for more information from various complainants and will be scheduling a meeting with Google. But that seems unlikely to happen before the year is out. Meanwhile, given the snail’s pace of the Europe Union’s powers-that-be, Google will no doubt be hatching a creative plan to ingrain itself in the hearts of minds of the people who wield the greatest power – your customers, the searchers.