document: Why Microsoft filed a formal complaint about Google and the search giant 's reponse Microsoft has made its first-ever formal complaint to antitrust regulators in the Euroean Union , alleging that Google systematically thwarts Internet search competition . This is how Microsoft and Google responded to the complaint . Microsoft : Competition must be fair Posted by Brad Smith Senior vice-president & general counsel , March 30 2011 Microsoft is filing a formal complaint with the European Commission as part of the Commission 's ongoing investigation into whether Google has violated European competition law . At the outset , we should be among the first to compliment Google for its genuine innovations , of which there have been many over the past decade . Google has done much to advance its laudable mission to '' `` organise the world 's information '' '' , but we 're concerned by a broadening pattern of conduct aimed at stopping a competitive alternative . We 've therefore decided to join a large and growing number of companies registering their concerns about the European search market . By the European Commission 's own reckoning , Google has about 95pc of the search market in Europe . This contrasts with the United States , where Microsoft serves about a quarter of Americans ' search needs either directly through Bing or through our partnership with Yahoo! . Our filing today focuses on a pattern of actions that Google has taken to entrench its dominance in the markets for online search and search advertising to the detriment of European consumers . How does it do this ? Google has built its business on indexing and displaying snippets of other organisations ' web content . It understands that search engines depend upon the openness of the web to function properly , and it 's quick to complain when others undermine this . Search engines compete to index the web as fully as possible to generate good search results , they compete to gain advertisers -- the source of revenue in this business -- and distribution of their search boxes through websites . Consumers will not benefit from clicking to alternative sites unless all search engines have a fair opportunity to compete in each of these areas . Our filing details many instances where Google is impeding competition , for instance , since Google acquired YouTube in 2006 it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results . Microsoft recognises the importance of ensuring that competition laws remain balanced and that technology innovation moves forward . Google : We try to be as open as we can Posted by Matt Cutts , Principal engineer , Search Quality Team , March 2 2010 Recently the European Commission opened a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints . Part of the complaint alleges that Google operates without sufficient transparency into how and why websites rank in our search results . The notion that Google is n't transparent is tough for me to swallow . One of the most widely-discussed parts of Google 's scoring has always been PageRank . That '' `` secret ingredient '' '' is hardly a secret . An early paper not only gave the formula for PageRank , but mentioned many of the other signals in Google 's ranking , including anchor text , the location of words within documents , the relative proximity of query words in a document , the size and type of fonts used , the raw HTML of each page , and capitalisation of words . Google has continued to publish literally hundreds of research papers over the years . Those papers reveal many of the '' `` secret formulas '' '' for how Google works and document essential infrastructure that Google uses . Some of these papers have spurred not only open-source projects but entire companies in their own right . Academic papers are one thing , but Google also aims to engage and educate in many other ways . In 1999 , Sergey Brin -LSB- Google co-founder -RSB- participated in the first Search Engine Strategies conference for webmasters . In 2001 , Google became one of the first search engines to engage online at a publisher forum called WebmasterWorld . We 've tried all sorts of experiments to help site owners understand how Google 's search ranking works . We 've done multiple live webmaster chats online with hundreds of simultaneous participants . We also engage online across the blogosphere to answer questions about Google 's practices . The list goes on and on . At Google , we try to be as open as we can , even to the point of helping users export their data out of Google 's products . At the same time , we do n't think it 's unreasonable for any business to have some trade secrets , not least because we do n't want to help spammers and crackers game our system . Ultimately , criticising Google for its '' `` secret formula '' '' is an easy claim to make , but it just is n't true .
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