Google Accused of Hiding Competing Webmail Service from Search Results

The search engine has been accused of hiding a ProtonMail service from its search results for about a year, which cost the company hundreds of thousands in lost revenue.

ProtonMail provides encrypted email accounts for users, and is known to be one of the most popular services since its very launch 2 years ago, according to its Google search ranking: ProtonMail claims it was placed on the first or second page of the searches for encrypted and secure email.

However, its ranking plummeted a year ago – from the first page to the 5th, 10th, and nowhere visible at all. The company says they were trying to contact Google all throughout spring 2016, having created 2 tickets on Google’s web spam report form explaining the situation. Moreover, ProtonMail even contacted Google’s president of EMEA strategic relationships, but no response or change followed.

As a result, the company’s growth rate dropped by 25% for the past months, which cost it “several hundred thousand Swiss Francs”, and it decided to go semi-public, publishing tweets addressed to Google and accusing it of intentionally hiding ProtonMail from search results. Perhaps, this was noticed by the search giant, because the mail service received a reply from Google that it had “fixed something” without providing any details of what exactly it was. Indeed, ProtonMail immediately returned to the first page of results and stays there.

The industry experts suggest that one potential cause of the drop in ranking could be the site moving domains, from .ch to .com, as such moves can cause the collected authority attributed to the website to be lost, thus forcing website operators to start afresh. However, ProtonMail claims that the event demonstrated the existence of “search risk”, pointing out that any service can thus easily be suppressed by search companies or the governments that control them, even across national borders. For instance, Google, which is a US firm, controls more than 90% of European search traffic. ProtonMail agrees with the European Commission that more transparency and oversight is critical in Google’s case.

Google confirmed that they managed to find and fix the problem affecting the search results after the affected company’s report, but no further details followed.