As Google comes under fire with the European Commission (EC) investigating complaints made against the company around the way in which it search results appear, Bill Fischer, co-founder of Twitter Job Search, says he does not believe the company has behaved in an anti-competitive way.

“We operate a number of vertical search products so we watch this carefully. Our belief though, from our years working with Google, is that they are committed to delivering the best searches for their users,” Fischer told Recruiter. “Their algorithms are attuned to the best user experience and not to demote sites unless they think those sites are spam.”

On the European public policy blog, Google’s senior competition counsel, Julia Holtz said that the EC had received the complaints from French legal search engine ejustice.fr, UK price comparison site Foundem and Microsoft’s Ciao! from Bing.

Holtz said: “Foundem - a member of an organisation called ICOMP which is funded partly by Microsoft - argues that our algorithms demote their site in our results because they are a vertical search engine and so a direct competitor to Google. ejustice.fr’s complaint seems to echo these concerns.

“Our algorithms aim to rank first what people are most likely to find useful and we have nothing against vertical search sites - indeed many vertical search engines like Moneysupermarket.com, Opodo and Expedia typically rank high in Google’s results.

“Though each case raises slightly different issues, the question they ultimately pose is whether Google is doing anything to choke off competition or hurt our users and partners. This is not the case. We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users’ interests first and to compete fair and square in the market. We believe our business practices reflect those commitments.”

A Microsoft spokesman told the BBC: “Although we haven’t been notified yet by the commission, we do believe it’s natural for competition officials to look at online advertising given how important it is to the development of the internet and the dominance of one player.”

Fischer adds: “We have some products that Google delivers a lot of traffic for and we have some products that we wish Google delivered more traffic for, but we don’t think the company is behaving in an anti-competitive way. We just think that on certain products of ourswe need to be more attuned to Google’s search algorithms.”