The Californian search giant is presently being investigated by the EU’s European Commission over alleged violations of anti-trust law.
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Interestingly, European Union has entertained this claimed and has entered Getty Images as “interested third party” in the Antitrust Probe.
“These activities have allowed Google to create and maintain dominant market shares in general and image search”, the company added.
The full version of the document was sent to Google in April that said the huge company was wielding its influence over the search-engine market. It’s this that has raised drawn the attention of the European Commission, though Google has previously denied any wrongdoing.
Google spokesman Al Verney declined to comment.
It comes as Getty, majority owned by the Carlyle Group, is seeking to distribute its collection more widely but has thus far struggled to drive traffic to gettyimages.com – despite possessing a collection of over 100m images. More recently, it has been building a consumer business to distribute its images more widely, putting it in closer competition with Google.
A separate report on The Next Web said pages that use emoji won’t be penalized, but Google “just will not show the symbols when it returns their page in search results”.
The lack of traffic to Getty Images’ websites also makes it harder for the company to collect data on visitors and their searches, information that can help improve its image-search service, it told European regulators. Users that click on images in the carousel are not lead to source sites, but are instead directed to Google Images, where large format, often unattributed images, can be viewed, it said in a statement Monday.
Back in the first week of May, Google said they would drop emojis from their search results pages. The charges focused specifically on Google‘s comparison-shopping service, but Ms. Vestager said she also continued to examine other domains, such as travel and local services, where Google is accused of favoring its own services.
Getty Images sued Microsoft Corp.in 2014 alleging a Bing image search service infringed copyright.
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