Google is too googol on the market, TradeComet sues the giant

On Tuesday a small Web site operator TradeComet.com applied with an antitrust suit against Google, accusing it of unfairly manipulating its advertising system to harm a potential competitor. Google was accused by TradeComet, that operates a site SourceTool.com, a vertical search engine for seeking business products and services, of raising the advertising rates it charged the company after it realized that SourceTool as a potential competitor. 

Moreover TradeComet consider that Google entered into an anticompetitive agreement with a SourceTool’s rival Business.com. But a vice president for marketing at Business.com Ben Hanna said that the company had no special relationship with Google. 

As TradeComet said, Google initially welcomed SourceTool, which bought ads on Google to drive traffic to its site. That traffic grew quickly, reaching 650,000 visitors a day. By the following year Google increased the prices that SourceTool had to bid for its ads by as much as 10,000 %, the company charged. Google uses its own algorithm to assign “quality scores” to advertisers’ sites, using measures like the apparent usefulness of the sites. That advertisers who have low scores have to pay more for their ads, and many advertisers have made complains that Google can use the system to manipulate prices.

According to the legal experts’ opinion, the lawsuit appeared to be fallout from the Justice Department review of the partnership, which concluded that Google’s market share in search advertising amounted to a monopoly, but they were split on the merits of the case.