You must be aware of the on going anti-trust trial from European Commission against Google on their search practices. The companies which oppose Google in this case includes Microsoft, Yelp, Trip Advisor and more. Recently, they have created a new website to showcase their concerns to the competition commission. As the European Commission considers how best to address its anticompetitive concerns with Google, they have offered this tool, Focus on the User – Local, as a potential framework for ensuring that consumer welfare is maximised.
You might think that Google gives you the best answers from across the web when you search for something as important as a pediatrician in Munich, a bicycle repair shop in Copenhagen, or a hotel in Madrid. But Google doesn’t actually use its normal organic search algorithm to produce the responses to this question that you see prominently on the first screen. Instead, it promotes a more limited set of results drawn from Google+ ahead of the more relevant ones you would get from using Google’s organic search algorithm.
The European Commission is weighing its options to ensure that consumers searching using Google can access all websites, not just content powered by Google+. We think the best way to do that is using Google’s own organic search algorithm to identify the most relevant results — regardless of their source — from across the web.
We built a tool to demonstrate how easy it is to make this happen. We’ve even tested its results with thousands of users to show that consumers prefer results that aren’t exclusively powered by Google+. Rather, they prefer to get the most relevant results. All of the information in this demonstration comes from Google itself, and the ranking decisions are made by Google’s own algorithms, followed by a basic sort according to average rating and review quantity.
Find more information about it here.