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Judge: Google dominance didn’t hurt online maps competitor

StreetMap traffic fell after Google began showing map previews in search results.

Judge: Google dominance didn’t hurt online maps competitor

Google has won a High Court battle brought by StreetMap.EU Ltd, which had claimed in its lawsuit that the multinational's alleged search dominance had destroyed the UK-based online mapping company's business.

StreetMap alleged that Google's arrival in the online mapping market in 2007 was calamitous for the company. Its commercial director, Kate Sutton, told Ars that—at its height—StreetMap had a healthy turnover, five million users, and 20 staff members at its offices in Milton Keynes.

The British firm, founded in 1997, claimed StreetMap had been squished by Google when the multinational started displaying a map at the top of its search results. Google's map contained a thumbnail image directly generated from its own mapping service—known then as "Maps OneBox."

Sutton claimed that traffic to the Streetmap.co.uk site plummeted immediately after Google's map service went live in the UK. In a statement following today's High Court judgment, Sutton said: "StreetMap has been frozen in time; because of what Google did, StreetMap has not been able to properly invest in the website since 2007."

"The decision is unfair for small businesses," Sutton said, and added that StreetMap would attempt to appeal against the judgment, which found that Google's search dominance had not directly harmed competition in the UK's online mapping market.

Google—which has been fighting a lengthy, high-profile search abuse case that was first opened by the European Commission in 2010—told Ars: "The court made clear that we're focused on improving the quality of our search results. This decision promotes innovation."

Channel Ars Technica