Google Admits to Poaching Clients and Lying to Kenyan Businesses

Google has responded to the allegations that it tried to steal business away from a Kenyan company, used its data without permission and lied about a partnership with it, and has admitted that a "team of people" has actually done everything Google was accused of.

Google issued a statement after analyzing the situation, admitted the wrongdoing and apologized for it. It also said there would be repercussions for those involved.

"We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality’s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites. We’ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality,"  Nelson Mattos, Google VP of product and engineering in Europe and emerging markets, said.

"We’re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we’ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved," he added on Google+.

Mocality, a Kenyan site that operates a local business directory, with some 170,000 businesses listed, wrote a lengthy post accusing Google of scraping its business database for data and then contacting those companies, offering the web hosting and other services while claiming that Google was working together with Mocality.

Mocality presented plenty of evidence, including access logs from IPs associated with Google and phone conversations with Google employees.

Even with Google admitting everything, there are still plenty of questions to be answered. Google's response doesn't clearly say whether its own employees or a third party is responsible. What is clear is that Google provided resources to the project and not only in Kenya. That said, local teams are quite independent at Google.

One thing's for sure, Google hasn't had a great 2012. It started out with the paid links controversy surrounding a Google Chrome ad campaign. Google ended up penalizing the Google Chrome page and demoting it in the search results. Next came the whole Search Plus debacle and now this.