**The European Commission is looking into complaints about Google’s behaviour, the company has revealed.**The complaints were made by UK price comparison site Foundem, French legal search engine ejustice.fr, and Microsoft’s Ciao.
Google’s senior competition lawyer Julia Holtz said the internet giant was “confident” it operated within European competition law.
Foundem claims that its site is demoted in Google’s search results.
“Foundem… argues that our algorithms demote their site in our results because they are a vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google,” Google said.
“ejustice.fr’s complaint seems to echo these concerns.”
The complaint regarding Ciao, which Microsoft bought in 2008, concerns Google’s standard terms and conditions.
Microsoft initially took its case to the German competition authority, but Google said it had now been transferred to Brussels.
“Although we haven’t been notified yet by the commission, we do believe it’s natural for competition officials to look at online advertising given how important it is to the development of the internet and the dominance of one player,” a Microsoft spokesman said.
“In the meantime, we continue to cooperate with the German government’s investigation into complaints brought by Ciao.”
In a blog, Google’s Ms Holtz revealed that the commission had told the company it had received the complaints.
“Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners,” she said. “This is not the case.”