With federal regulators pursuing an antitrust probe over whether Google (GOOG) is abusing its dominance in search to favor its own online products, a company that owns several Bay Area websites promoting local small businesses is taking the rare step of publicly challenging the fairness of the search giant.
ShopCity, the parent company of local sites such as ShopPaloAlto.com, ShopMountainView.com and ShopPleasanton.com, says Google provides it an unfairly low ranking, especially since those sites have the backing of groups such as the city of Menlo Park, the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and the Palo Alto Weekly newspaper. A search for "Palo Alto restaurants" on Google this week didn't reveal a ShopPaloAlto.com result until the seventh page of results, while the site ranks at the top for identical searches on Yahoo (YHOO) or Microsoft's Bing.
"The most dangerous man is a man with nothing to lose, and that's the position they've put us in," said Colin Pape, the president of ShopCity, who is considering complaining to federal regulators.
