That Google products are some of the most used in the world is not news. The Moutain View company has a very extensive catalog of products and services, but its “workhorse” is still the search engine. Its popularity is such that “Google” is the most searched term by Bing users , according to Google, of course.
What Google mentions is not far-fetched, clearly. However, the company has not done it just to mock its rival, but as part of a legal strategy. According to Bloomberg, the plan of Californians is to use this type of data to avoid paying a million-dollar fine in Europe .
Basically, Google wants to show that the European Commission's punishment for abuse of a dominant position is not fair. For this reason, it ensures that users are not forced to use its products, but rather seek them on their own initiative , even having rival alternatives available.
According to a statistical compilation of ahrefs, “Google” is indeed the most entered term globally in Bing, with 40.96 million monthly searches . This figure “represents 13.2% of the entire global search volume,” they explain. In second place in the ranking is YouTube, with 35.28 million.
Google stands to cancel a million-dollar fine from the European Commission
Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash As we mentioned at the beginning, by showing the interference of its products in Bing searches, Google intends to show that the public uses them by choice, not by imposition . This is how he tries to “save himself” from paying a fine of more than 4 billion euros imposed by the European Commission in 2018 for abuse of a dominant position.
Those of Mountain View have already appealed the punishment in the past, but they are permanently under the scrutiny of the regulators . In the middle of this year, for example, the European Union announced that it would investigate the company for alleged monopoly in the advertising market. While inquiries related to the use of the Google Assistant recently began.
We'll see if Bing's statistics allow Google to avoid paying the fine. Surely Microsoft is not very pleased that their search engine is used as bait to make life easier for a direct rival.
