Google Would Promote Rival Services for Free in the EU, Competitors Still Unsatisfied

Google has been trying to settle an investigation in Europe into whether its practices are unfair to competition.

Competitors like Microsoft along with some rather obscure companies and sites have been complaining about the fact that Google includes links and data from its other properties in search results, maps from Google Maps for example.

They would like Google to promote their sites for free instead and argue that it's unfair that Google is allowed to not promote their sites for free.

Still, Google is prepared to make some concessions to move past the investigation. Now, European regulators have published the list of concessions Google is willing to make.

Some of them are rather obvious and probably things Google should have offered already, whether it has a legal requirement or not.

These are things like offering ways to port ad campaigns to competitors, allow publishers to opt out of Google News without opting out of the search results and so on.

But the things that are going to affect users the most, at least the most directly, are the changes to the results.

Google promises to do a better job at highlighting the portions of the search results page that link to its own properties, with a frame or something of the sort. Google also promises to provide three links to competitors offering similar products.

This should work similar to the way Google provides links to financial sites when searching for stock prices.

A query for "goog," Google's own ticker, will provide a box (with a frame) displaying the current share price, its history and some other data. But below the box, Google also provides links to Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money, separate from the organic results.

Obviously, the vocal competitors who have been complaining all this while aren't satisfied, but it's hard to imagine anything other than Google sending all traffic their way satisfying them.

The European Commission is now asking for feedback on the concessions and will "market test" them to see how effective they prove, before settling with Google.