Senator Conroy has continued to attack Google over privacy, all while Google dominates the Australian market, with the company responsible for over 90 percent of internet searches.
Google continues its near monopoly position in Australia, with Experian Hitwise releasing data that reveals Google.com.au continues to be the dominant search engine with 85.18 percent of all searches by Australian Internet users, for the month of April. When combined with the company’s Google.com site, Google represent more than 90 percent of Australian internet searches. Google has increased its share of search by 2.99 per cent compared with March 2010.
Google is attracting significant criticism over its behaviour and market dominance in Australia, with Senator Conroy attacking the company over privacy concerns in a Senate Estimates hearing Monday for the Labor Government’s proposed internet filter.
“Google has admitted that their Streetview cars-the ones that drive down your street and photograph your house without your permission so that they can make it available worldwide” he said.
Senator Conroy then went on to bash Google further in his comments, with Senators Fisher and Ludlam suggesting that Conroy had a personal agenda against Google.
“This is a company that says ‘do no evil’, but tries to pretend that it is not motivated by profit and that it knows best and ‘you can trust us’ when it comes to privacy. Unfortunately there are no safeguards. You are dealing with company policy.” Conroy said.
Despite the attacks from Government, Google’s dominance continues with Yahoo!7 the big loser in all this down 11.31 percent. Bing fared better, but was still down slipping 6.87 percent for the month of April.
Cumulatively Bing and Yahoo (including search.yahoo.com) only account for 8.01 percent of the Australian search market. This is despite both search engines being tied into content networks (Yahoo!7 and NineMSN) that both see significant traffic to their portals.
