EU Probes Google

You  thought Google was angry about China dominating their domestic search engine market. European officials have greeted news of Google acquiring coupon monster site Groupon with a probe into antitrust practices. Supposedly consumer complaints have grounded this inquiry with question concerning Google SERP determination, business practices, and marketing dominance.

There is more than a veiled hint that Google’s probable strategies with respect to offering customers returns on their traffic and advertising depend heavily on Google’s own decisions and data handling. The same companies that determines which sites get the most site traffic and the most selective attributes of such traffic is also the company that benefits from such determinations.

The European Commission has stated that Google has stifled competition by rigging search results in a manner that favors their own end product and pecuniary outcome. This could be a big marketing shift for European and UK domainers with actively Google oriented sites. Google currently controls more than 75% of European online search market traffic. Comscore reports the Google United States market share is closer to 66%.

The websites Foundem (UK) and Bing’s Ciao and a French site, Ejustice, all complained to the European Commission’s appropriate authorities concerning perceived improprieties in how Google does business. Primary among these concerns is nonpaid Google SERP listings versus paid Google customer’s SERP positions. Related scoring of competing advertisers as website quality factors by Google is also at issue.

Industry analysts cited the 4% drop in Google stock not to the EU scrutiny of the Google search engine positioning practices but to the overpayment possibilities for the current rumored Groupon buyout. Groupon, a geologically data driven site with retailer coupons for dining and entertainment, is in play to join Google’s stable of company entities and advertising programs.

The growing size of Google may be a concern, note a recent Los Angeles Times article (complete with dominant Google ad on load). “Size matters” it states. Could the combined powers of Europe stop the spread of Google power, when the Rising Sun nation of China could not?

Most expensive .eu domain names in the past

Recently there were a few x,xxx range .eu domain sales and that made me look at previous sale history of .eu domain names.

I have listed most expensive .eu domain sales in the past (reported sales).

Domains	Prices Sold
Hotels.eu	$  329,509.00
Shopping.eu	$  196,803.00
Games.eu	$    95,850.00
Apotheke.eu	$    81,070.00
OnlineCasino.eu	$    46,748.00
Blackjack.eu	$    45,000.00
Telefonbuch.eu	$    37,800.00
Russia.eu	$    34,320.00
GPS.eu	$    33,480.00
Slots.eu	$    31,200.00
Internet.eu	$    26,250.00
Money.eu	$    20,005.00
Blog.eu	$    19,170.00
TTS.eu	$    17,625.00
Vouchers.eu	$    14,751.00
Cool.eu	$    14,300.00
Einfamilienhaus.eu	$    14,219.00
yq.eu	$    13,917.00
schmuck.eu	$    13,603.00
Series.eu	$    13,539.00
Tax.eu	$    12,530.00
Digital.eu	$    11,200.00
Oncology.eu	$    10,575.00
EuroPalace.eu	$    10,500.00
uc.eu	$      9,658.00
InternetCasinos.eu	$      9,607.00

möbel.eu sold for over $13,000 (9,100 EUR)

Recently möbel.eu was sold for Euro 9,100 which is equivalent to over $13,000 and it was a good .eu domain sale.

möbel is a German word and it means “furniture”. When I had a look at the keyword search volume, it has quite a healthy search volume per month in the region of six figure search per month. In the google search engine, the search result comes up with over 25 million results for the keyword “möbel“.

It was one of the good .eu domain sales, IMO.