It has just been announced that Google is facing a preliminary antitrust investigation by the European Commission.

On their blog post they mention that they have received complaints from three different companies, which it lists as Ciao! from Microsoft, ejustice.fr and UK price comparison site Foundem.

In essence the complaints claim that these websites rankings are demoted intentionally by Google’s algorithm due to the fact they are direct competitors. In the post Google claims this is not the case and that other vertical search engines such as Moneysupermarket typically rank well in the search results.

With pretty much all of Google’s revenue coming from paid search advertising services this is a situation they could do without, but this isn’t the first time Google has been confronted with similar allegations and by now they’re probably getting used to it.

Yahoo have just announced that they will be partnering with Twitter, which means they will now be integrating updates from the public twitter feed.

The latest move is yet another step by search engines to increase the relevancy of results by providing users with real time search helping to strike a balance between up to date results and older ones from more informative sources.

Here’s the image taken from the Yahoo Blog flikr page

Although this won’t be visible on all searches just yet, over the coming months we should see Twitter integration becoming more common in the search results.