Facebook is unique in that its users have played a significant role, if not the most significant role, in what it is today. According to its S-1 filing, Facebook has 845 million active monthly users. Due to this widespread user base combined with the nature of Facebook, the news of the IPO has been particularly intriguing.

Users are excited because they feel a special connection to Facebook. While it is substantial news, there are some issues being raised about it from a business perspective, particularly over its estimated valuation.

Is Facebook worth $100 billion? What do you think?

According to Francis Gaskins, President and Partner at IPODesktop.com, the past 4-5 quarters are very indicative of its future. Based on the information that was released in the filing, he does not think $100 billion is a reasonable valuation for Facebook.

“At $100 billion market cap, Facebook would be selling at about 53 percent of Google’s cap,” he said.

As he explains, Facebook’s revenue in 2011 was $3.7 billion. Google, on the other hand, had revenue of $46 billion, which is more than 10 times the amount of Facebook’s. Given this data, Gaskins doesn’t see how Facebook is worth 53 percent of Google.

Gaskins also points out that the past quarters are telling of the company’s rate of growth. He told us he was “quite surprised” when he saw the details.

“[If] you look at what happened for December 2010, March, June, and September of 2011, oddly enough, what you will find is the operating earnings were flat,” he said. “The net after tax earnings were flat, and the margins – the profit margins – went down.”

He believes the $100 billion valuation points to the ego of Mark Zuckerberg as well as the fact that Facebook is falling into the trap of believing their own press releases, a move that he calls “very, very dangerous.”

“The credibility of management’s forecast is very, very important,” he said.

Gaskins told us that Facebook didn’t have a solid strategy for being profitable that would appease Wall Street, especially since its revenue was flat even without any real competitors. However, now that Google+ exists and is appearing to gain ground, he said that Facebook’s current projections could really hurt it. He believes that Facebook should have filed its IPO last summer when it was the only player in the space.

Another issue he sees from a business perspective is how Facebook is defined.

“It’s not a technology company,” he said. “It’s a consumer of technology, which is different. They’re offering a service, and they’re not selling technology.”

Facebook is, however, an Internet advertising company like Google. According to Price Waterhouse, the yearly compound growth rate for Internet advertising will be 12 percent through 2015. So, at this rate, it doesn’t translate into high multiple market growth for Facebook.

With these revelations and others being analyzed, the social giant will likely face a lot of scrutiny. What’s bad is that Facebook is about to enter the quiet period, which means that it will not be able to respond to the negativity.

On the bright side, Gaskins did say that Facebook’s IPO would have a positive impact on the economy.

“It’ll definitely help the economy because there will be a lot more money flowing around in the tech area,” he said.

The coalition, made up of Google competitors, including main competitor Microsoft, is expanding more beyond travel sites now. The coalition announced today that it has added not only new members in travel, but also members in e-commerce and advertising.

New members include: PPC ad company adMarketplace, online travel industry trade group the Interactive Travel Services Association (ITSA), online shopping site Twenga and marketing firm ShopCity.com.

You may recall, ShopCity filed an antitrust complaint against Google with the FTC a couple months ago:

For most of its existence, ShopCity’s growth has been thwarted by unjustified Google penalties and anticompetitive Google prefacing. These matters were realized in writing with the Commission staff months ago, but the staff has not followed up in any respect.

“When a company begins competing directly with Google, in a market where they are not yet the dominant player, Google will make it very difficult to succeed,” says ShopCity CEO Colin Pape today. “In the process, Google harms consumers by steering them away from relevant results, solely for Google’s own financial benefit.”

“We believe that Google uses its monopoly power to distort the marketplace by steering consumers away from the natural search results available for travel online,” says ITSA President Joseph Rubin. “Further, the online travel companies are required to provide various consumer disclosures with their listings. Our members think consumers deserve the protection of those disclosures that we provide, and that Google Flight Search in many cases does not.”

Twenga filed a complaint with the European Commission earlier this week, asking it to stop Google’s “anti-competitive business and search practices”. Twenga says these “undermine jobs and innovation in the European Union.”

Interestingly enough Google was in Brussels this week with members of the Commission talking about how businesses are growing, thanks to the Internet.

“By systematically ranking its own offerings over links to competitors, Google uses its dominant power to hurt other businesses rather than competing fairly in the marketplace,” says Bastien Duclaux, co-founder and CEO of Twenga. “Google’s abuse of its monopoly power in search threatens the ability of innovators everywhere to reach consumers on the Internet. Google has created the conditions for an uneven playing field in which it is predetermined to always emerge as the winner.”

adMarketplace CEO James Hill says, “As media industry veterans, we have built a compelling search advertising network. Every day, our client teams hear from potential customers and publishers that Google makes it difficult for them to work with other advertising networks. A level playing field is critical to a competitive online advertising marketplace – and that does not exist today because of Google’s practices.”

You can see a recent interview we did with FairSearch here, as well well as an interview TechFreedom, arguing against the merits of the coalition’s agenda.

The group’s Privacy Project Director John M. Simpson wrote a letter to Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia, saying, “The Commission’s role in keeping Google’s abuses in check is essential. Its executives have close relationships with many U.S. officials and the company just spent a record $9.7 million in 2011 lobbying policymakers in Washington. We have faith the Commission will not succumb to such influence. The Internet is too important to allow an unregulated monopolist to dominate it. We call on you to take the steps necessary to prevent it: block the Motorola merger and file a formal antitrust complaint against Google.”

If you’re unfamiliar with Consumer Watchdog, they’re the U.S.-based consumer advocacy group responsible for this:

And this:

Simpson is currently in Brussels to discuss standards for a Do Not Track mechanism at a meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Tracking Protection Working Group.

The group expects the Commission to decide its position on the Motorola deal by mid-February, and a decision on whether to file a formal antitrust complaint by the end of March.

Below is Simpson’s letter to Almunia in its entirety:

Dear Vice President Almunia:

John M. Simpson
Privacy Project Director
Consumer Watchdog

Senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee recently wrote the Federal Trade Commission a letter calling for investigation into Google’s practices. “Given the scope of Google’s market share in general Internet search, a key question is whether Google’s using its market power to steer users to its own web products or secondary services and discriminating against other websites with which it compete,” the letter said.

The FTC already has an investigation going on, of course, and now, Bloomberg is reporting that it is expanding it to include Google+ scrutiny.

Do you think the government understands the Internet well enough to regulate it? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Something tells me recent events will only be used to fuel the fire of complaints to that effect, with Twitter and Facebook now speaking out against Google. Privacy watchdog EPIC is already considering a complaint to the FTC about Search Plus Your World, as well.

Competitors in the travel industry formed the FairSearch Coalition, initially to try and see Google’s acquisition of ITA Software (which would go on to power Google’s Flight Search) blocked. The acquisition was not blocked, but the group continues to campaign against what it considers to be Google’s abuse of power.

WebProNews spoke with Ben Hammer of FairSearch, who says what the group is focused on now that authorities in the U.S. and the European Union and around the world “have already established that Google has monopoly power in search on the Internet” would be: “is Google violating the law in ways that abuse that power to sort of tilt the playing field to itself, and basically restrict the options that consumers on the Internet have to find information, and then also get all the benefits that come from competition on the Internet?”

We asked Hammer what makes FairSearch think Google favors its products any more than any other search engine does. It is, after all, a fact that Bing’s results contain links to Microsoft’s own services. Bing director Stefan Weitz noted that the search engine’s goal is for users to stay on Bing’s site: “We’re taking Bing to a place you can actually accomplish things and do things, rather than send you off to those [other] sites,” he is quoted as saying.

“The group was formed by a number of companies that looked at how Google was already operating in other markets, and were concerned about how they’d operate in travel,” said Hammer. “As those concerns got greater awareness or were validated in some ways by the U.S. justice department that was reviewing that merger, we continued to hear from other companies in markets outside of travel – that said, ‘We’ve experienced this first hand. We know that Google takes our content and uses it to direct people back to their own services and away from ours. We know that Google puts links to its own products that compete with ours at the top of the page, eating up the most valuable real estate that people click on the most on its own pages. That makes it harder for us to get the traffic that we would normally get. We know that Google will bid against us in getting the most valuable advertising on its own pages…’”

Note, that this response didn’t exactly answer the question.

In November, Cyber Monday and Black Friday sites (including the official site of the group that created Cyber Monday — were removed completely from Bing’s search results). When asked specifically about the incident, he said he was not familiar with the topic, but that “this group from day one has been focused on what Google is doing with monopoly power.”

A different standard, he says, is applied to companies like Google because of this power.

“Most people understand that Microsoft [part of the coalition] and our other competitors complain constantly about Google, but they also know that Google builds our search results for users, not websites, and that the laws are designed to protect consumers, not competitors,” a Google spokesperson tells WebProNews. “The fundamental openness of the Internet means that consumers have infinite choices and can always switch to Bing, Facebook, Kayak, or Expedia with just one click.”

WebProNews also spoke with Berin Szoka, the President of free market think tank TechFreedom who has some criticisms of FairSearch itself.

“I think it’s unfortunate that a lot of the tech policy debates really come down to motives,” he says, noting that the coalition is simply an alliance of Google’s competitors.

“Microsoft’s Bing is, if anything, much more biased than Google. You might say that’s OK because they’re not a dominant firm, so maybe they can do things that Google can’t, but if bias is your only way of distinguishing what’s competitive and what’s not competitive, it really is a problem that the industry norm, which is bias, is in fact the very thing that FairSearch is complaining about. Really, the analysis has to go a lot more beyond that and ask where there’s some example of consumer harm.”

“In this case, it’s hard to actually see any consumers complaining, as opposed to just Microsoft’s compatriots and this coalition,” he adds.

He goes on to make the case that we should be skeptical anytime competitors try to use regulators for competition, not only because it can hurt a company like Google, but that it could hurt the next Google by setting precedents.

He also compares the whole thing to SOPA, saying, “There are few people here in D.C. that really understand how the Internet works well enough to even have an intelligent conversation about how government can improve things.”

“I think when you see a company like Facebook, as large as it is, and as much of a lead in that area as it does, teaming up with a company like Microsoft, I think that is in fact the way competition works. It doesn’t happen necessarily in this space directly.”

Google has a site dedicated to what it calls “facts about Google and competition.” On the site, Google says, “As Google has grown, we’ve faced more questions about our approach to competition. This kind of scrutiny goes with the territory when you’re a large company. However, we’ve always worked hard to ensure that our success is earned the right way – through technological innovation and great products, rather than by locking in our users or advertisers, or creating artificial barriers to entry.”

“It takes a broadband connection to get onto the Internet, but consumers don’t need Google to access the web,” Google continues. “Google serves more like a GPS on the Internet highway—not an on-ramp. It helps people get around, but it’s not necessary. If someone knows where he wants to go, he can navigate to those destinations directly, whether it’s Craigslist, the New York Times websites, or icanhascheezburger.com. But, if he doesn’t know where he’s going, he can use a ‘GPS’ (a search engine like Google or Bing), a ‘map’ (a list of links or portal like Yahoo’s directory), directions or recommendations from a friend (links from Twitter or Facebook friends), or even a mobile application version of the service (for example, the NY Times iPhone application). Search engines are popular and useful, but they’re just one of many ways to navigate the web.”

“The Internet was built on fundamentally open architecture,” Google says. “Anyone at home with a computer and a web connection can type in the address of a website and navigate straight to that site. Google is one click away from losing every customer. There are virtually no switching costs, and there are many other valuable web services competing for traffic. If someone wants to use a competing search engine all they need to do is type ‘www.yahoo.com’ into a web browser.”

Do you agree with Google or its competitors? Let us know in the comments.

Do you agree? Is Search Plus Your World bad for the Internet? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Google Vs. Twitter

The Google vs. Twitter element of this thing has been very interesting to me. In case you haven’t been following, let us recap this public back and forth these two companies have had this week. It started, when after Google announced SPYW, Twitter General Counsel tweeted:

And Twitter emailed a statement around to the press, which said:

For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

Google responded to Twitter on Google+ saying:

“We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”

I also found it a bit odd that Twitter would say this now, when really the lack of that aforementioned agreement renewal is what caused Twitter results to be less prevalent in Google search results. Twitter has not returned my request for comment on that at this point, but Macgillivray did tweet an example of where Google is surfacing Google+ over Twitter for the query “@WWE”. I’m not sure this is actually a product of SPYW, though the new features do place a prominent box of recommended Google+ profiles on the right-hand side of the page.

In an article specifically about that, we asked if the “@” symbol really belongs to Twitter anyway. Let us know in the comments what you think about that.

Competition

A lot of people view Google’s pushing of Google+ in search results to be anticompetitive. Some disagree.

One point that has been brought up repeatedly is that Google could be recommending public profiles from Twitter and Facebook alongside its Google+ recommendations. Sure, they could.

Facebook and Twitter don’t grant access to Google for all of the stuff that would improve the personalization experience. Danny Sullivan was able to get Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt to talk a little about this:

Google Fellow Amit Singhal, told Sullivan, “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing things to see how it would work.”

Those are basically the same responses.

Likewise, in a blog post talking about the SPYW features, Google’s Matt Cutts talked about how the features do, in fact, surface content from other sites from the “open web”. It’s not just Google (though that still appears not to apply to the “People and Pages” recommendations box that gets such prominent attention – the feature that really seems to be causing the most stir).

But does Google not have the right to promote its own product in this way? Many don’t think it’s right. It’s worth noting that while Google may dominate in search, it is still an underdog in social. Even still, Google has only something like 65% of the search market.

“Is 65% enough to assert an effective monopoly?” asks Bud Gibson on Google+. “There’s probably plenty of room here for Google to assert that there’s healthy competition in the search and social spaces. And, … they’d be right.”

Matthew Yglesias at Slate writes, “A 65 percent market share in web search is big, but by no means a monopoly. And there are basically zero barriers to switching from Google Search to Bing.”

That plays to Google’s go-to statement of: “The competition is only a click away.”

For that matter, if people are using Google, and are signed into it, there’s a good chance that they want Google-related content. If you consider Google+ and Google search to be features of one larger Google product, than you might want these features to be as integrated as possible. All of Google’s products do operate under one central Google account. You expect Facebook search to return Facebook Pages.

Granted, Facebook isn’t apparently trying to be a search engine, but then why do they bother to supplement their search results with web results from Bing? Clearly Google and Facebook are direct competitors now – maybe not as much in search (yet), but as companies. If you look at things this way, you’d almost have to say that Google even having Google+ at all is anti-competitive. Are they not supposed to make the features of their broader Google product tightly integrated?

By the way, Google does a lot more to drive traffic to Twitter and Facebook than Facebook and Twitter do to drive traffic to Google.

“Given that it’s opt-out, I’m just not sure that this is all that different from Microsoft bundling IE with Windows,” says tech columnist MG Siegler. Based on a lot of what I’ve been reading around the web, quite a few agree with him.

Here are a few recent tweets about the issue:

Privacy watchdog EPIC may file a complaint with the FTC.

Regardless of whether Google’s features are right or wrong, the timing of their release could end up biting Google in the ass, considering the heavy amount of scrutiny over competitive practices that currently surround the company. The complaints continue to pile up, and in various areas of Google’s search offerings.

Is Search Relevancy Being Sacrificed for Google+ Promotion?

Beyond all of the debate about Google’s competitive practices, there is a more important issue, at least to users. The new features may impact relevancy of search results for the worse. I personally have noticed that they could be a lot better, in terms of being personalized for me. Granted, I can turn the personalization off with the controls Google provides.

Some simply don’t like the idea of Google filling up their results with info based on who they know just because they know them, or content from Google+ just because it’s from Google+. Sullivan points to some “real life examples” of where Google isn’t necessarily living up to the relevancy side of things.

As he says, “Those results are supposed to be showing what are the most relevant things for searchers out there. That’s how Google wins. That’s how Google sticks it to competitors, by not trying to play favorites in those results, nor by trying to punish people through them.”

Ironically, if Google’s results become less relevant, people will probably want to use Google less. Perhaps Twitter, Facebook and other “competitors” should be cheering on Google’s approach.

Do you think what Google is doing is good or bad for the web? Let us know in the comments.

I guess no news is good news for Google in this case.

According to Bloomberg, the formal complaint that may or may not happen would be related to alleged anticompetitive practice, as regulators investigate claims from competitors (including Microsoft of course) that Google has gone so far as to stop some sites from accepting rival ads.

The investigation appears to be about much more than just search results, though that is a big part of it. Some have even alleged that Google’s famous (or infamous, depending on how you look at it) Panda update has been used anti-competitively.

Newspaper publishers in Europe are complaining about Google’s use of news content…an age old complaint really.

Antitrust complaints about Google in general have also included complaints about reviews and travel information.

The company’s acquisition of ITA Software has been one of the biggest catalysts to such scrutiny, with travel sites, led by the FairSearch Coalition going on a huge campaign to push for regulation of Google’s ways.

As Google continues to acquire companies and get into more spaces, the complaints are likely to continue piling up.

In Europe, it’s still possible that Google could face a massive fine.

OK, that pretty much goes on all year ‘round.

Earlier this month, Google began showing its flight info (introduced back in September as the product of the company’s acquisition of ITA Software) right in regular search results for certain travel-related queries. Flight search was initially available via the left-hand navigation panel on Google searh result pages, but now these kinds of results are just the default search experience when Google thinks the users is looking for this kind of information.

“For example, if you search for [flights from San Francisco to Las Vegas] you’ll see a table that shows available flights, including duration and prices,” explained Emmet Connolly, UX designer on Google’s Flight Search feature. “You can adjust dates on the page, or click any flight to further research and book your trip.”

A new Wall Street Journal report says that the “top travel websites,” rely on Google for 10% to 20% of their traffic, citing Compete data, and that these sites are being pushed down Google’s SERPs in favor of Google’s own Flight search info. Obviously, they’re not happy about this.

There’s another interesting snippet from that report, talking about how Google said in talks with the Department of Justice around its ITA acquisition, that it would “build tools that drive more traffic to airline and online travel agency sites, and that competitors think Google is not living up to this promise. The report says:

Google acknowledges it has failed to make good on assurances it would link to the travel sites, but the company says it had no choice. “The airlines told us that they would not give us [travel data] if we provided booking links to” online travel agencies, Jeremy Wertheimer, ITA’s founder and now a Google vice president, said at an online travel conference last month.

It’s important to note that the DoJ did not require Google to link to the travel sites.

Google has been in antitrust discussions with regulators throughout the year, and last week, Senators Herb Kohl and Mike Lee put together a letter calling for an FTC investigation of Google, with an emphasis on the company’s search results. You can read that here.

Google paid $700 million to acquire ITA Software.

A new report from Bloomberg indicates that the DoJ’s staff attorneys have urged the deal’s approval after finding that there is plenty of competition in the space, though it still must be approved by senior department officials.

When Google initially announced its intent to acquire AdMeld, Google VP of Display Advertising, Neal Mohan, wrote:

By combining Admeld’s services, expertise and technology with Google’s offerings, we’re investing in what we hope will be an improved era of flexible ad management tools for major publishers. Together with Admeld, we hope to make display advertising simpler, more efficient and more valuable, provide improved support and services, and enable publishers to make more informed decisions across all their ad space. These are all things our publisher partners have been asking us to further invest in. Of course, Admeld will continue to support other ad networks, demand side platforms, exchanges and ad servers, to yield the best possible results for publishers.

Here’s a video intro to AdMeld:

In late July, Mohan said:

We’ve been discussing this deal with the Department of Justice, who are obliged to review the transaction because of its purchase price. As they do for many acquisitions, they have sent us a “second request”, which means that they are asking for more information in order to complete their review of this particular acquisition. This doesn’t surprise us, as today’s display advertising industry is very new and highly complex. But we’ll work to enable this review to be concluded as quickly as possible – display advertising is highly competitive and fast moving, and we don’t want our efforts to bring better services to our clients to be delayed.

It looks like the whole thing may be closer to a conclusion.

Google recently won DoJ approval of another big acquisition in ITA Software, and there was a much bigger stink made (among competitors) about that one. Granted, that approval did come with conditions.

That is, reportedly, if Google can’t settle with the European Commission in an antitrust investigation stemming from complaints initially made by search engines Ciao, Foundem and eJustice, but which also now include perspectives from 1plusV, VfT, Elfvoetbal, Hotmaps, Interactive Labs, nnpt.it, dealdujour.pro, and of course Microsoft. Twenga is also expected to file a complaint.

The report indicates, based on “sources close to the case,” that the EC will issue a 400-page statement of objections covering the allegations of Google’s “abuse of dominance”.

Yes, 400 pages.

Google Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt, the report says, is expected to meet with Commissioner Joaquín Almunia to discuss Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility,which raises a whole other slew of questions about Google’s competitive practices outside of the search industry (though there is certainly plenty of crossover).

Google has of course faced plenty of scrutiny here in the states regarding its competitive practices. That includes hearings with the Senate Antitrust Committee and scrutiny from the DoJ and FTC.

In June, the company put out a blog post discussing five principles that “will stand up” to scrutiny related to competition. The post was in response to the FTC, but the points summarize Google’s general view of the topic:

• Do what’s best for the user. We make hundreds of changes to our algorithms every year to improve your search experience. Not every website can come out at the top of the page, or even appear on the first page of our search results.

• Provide the most relevant answers as quickly as possible. Today, when you type “weather in Chicago” or “how many feet in a mile” into our search box, you get the answers directly—often before you hit “enter”. And we’re always trying to figure out new ways to answer even more complicated questions just as clearly and quickly. Advertisements offer useful information, too, which is why we also work hard to ensure that our ads are relevant to you.

• Label advertisements clearly. Google always distinguishes advertisements from our organic search results. As we experiment with new ad formats and new types of content, we will continue to be transparent about what is an ad and what isn’t.

• Be transparent. We share more information about how our rankings work than any other search engine, through our Webmaster Central site, blog, diagnostic tools,support forum, and YouTube. We also give advertisers detailed information about thead auction and tips to improve their ad quality scores. We’ve recently introduced even more transparency tools, announcing a major change to our algorithm, providing morenotice when a website is demoted due to spam violations, and giving advertisers new information about ads that break our rules.

• Loyalty, not lock-in. We firmly believe you control your data, so we have a team of engineers whose only goal is to help you take your information with you. We want you to stay with us because we’re innovating and making our products better—not because you’re locked in.

And of course, Google always like to play the “competition is only a click away” card.

For most of its existence, ShopCity’s growth has been thwarted by unjustified Google penalties and anticompetitive Google prefacing. These matters were realized in writing with the Commission staff months ago, but the staff has not followed up in any respect.

It goes on to talk about how Google has been engaging in anticompetitive tactics since 2006, and that a number of injured vertical competitors have complained, but none have “received a CID or any other compulsory process necessary for a serious investigation.”

It then goes on to talk about Google penalizing Foundem and JC Penney in different ways, with Foundem getting worse treatment because of being a vertical competitor. More on the Foundem and JC Penney stories here and here respectively.

“The yawning chasm between the reality of Google’s penalty conduct and the pretense of Google’s public proclamations of no manual intervention demanded some further explanation and Google tendered an explanation of sorts shortly thereafter,” the complaint reads. “Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, acknowledged that the company had a program for imposing manual penalties and conceded that Google also released such penalties manually. Most manual penalties expire in thirty days, Cutts asserted. Google also imposed algorithmic penalties, Cutts said, which the company would not release manually. Cutts gave no explanation as to why Penney suffered a penalty of only a few weeks for blatantly cheating in a way that hurt consumers, while Google’s competitors like Foundem languished in the ‘penalty box’ for years for no transgression other than competing against Google.”

It goes on to talk about Google launching Universal Search, pulling in results from its various verticals into the main results, the famous Yelp complaints, and things of this nature.

All of this appears to be aimed at establishing Google’s alleged history of anticompetitiveness, something that has also been a topic of discussion in the Senate.

At its core, the main direct complaint appears to be that Google places its own results above ShopCity’s. “Based on relevance and quality, a ShopCity listing (for, say, a plumber in Midland) might rank near the top of search results (Because of Google’s preferencing, ShopCity could place no higher than the slot behind all of Google’s preferences listings.),” the complaint says. “But Google then took the extraordinary step of dropping all of ShopCity’s listings, generally to the fifth page of search results or beyond, relevance notwithstanding, where few users would ever find them.

Interestingly, when I perform a search for “plumber in midland” I don’t see any Google results whatsoever. Here’s what I see:

The same search on Bing actually does place Bing’s own local results above all else, despite the complaint saying, “Contrary to recent bleating by Google apologists who claim that other horizontal search providers also preference their own vertical offerings, Microsoft and Yahoo rarely placed their own captive local search results at the top of the page ahead of a ShopCity listing.

It’s a similar story with Yahoo:

To be fair, this is only one example (I’m sure there are indeed instances where Google puts its own results above ShopCity’s).

Bloomberg shares a quote from Google about ShopCity. A spokesman is quoted as saying, “This company was violating Google’s guidelines against duplicate and auto-generated content — which our users tell us they don’t like. We twice offered the company advice on how to improve their websites.”

Clearly, ShopCity doesn’t feel it’s getting the RESPECT it deserves from Google.