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.