Internet giant under scrutiny over search dominance

Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt will take centre stage at a Senate hearing today into whether the internet giant is abusing its dominant position in online search.

The Mountain View, California-based Google has drawn increasing scrutiny from US and European regulators as it has grown over the years from a scrappy Silicon Valley startup into an internet powerhouse.

EU competition watchdogs began an investigation into Google in November and the US Federal Trade Commission opened its own probe into the company’s lucrative search and advertising business in June.

As it has grown, Google has branched out into various businesses including online mapping, shopping, travel and providing operating systems for mobile phones and tablet computers.

The Senate hearing, entitled The Power of Google: Serving Consumers or Threatening Competition? targets the activity at the heart of Google’s livelihood: Search.

According to the tracking firm comScore, Google accounted for 64.8 per cent of US search market share in August followed by Yahoo! with 16.3 per cent.

Microsoft, which has poured millions of research and advertising dollars into its own Web search engine, Bing, controls 14.7 per cent of the US search market, comScore said.