Lingerie and sex toy specialist Ann Summers has accused Google of product discrimination saying the tech giant’s pornography-related filters are erasing it from search results.
Ann Summers
It also said shoppers were being “directed to our competitors instead”, citing M&S, Boots and Amazon as examples that weren’t being subject to the same restrictions despite selling similar products, reported The Telegraph.
The retailer has complained to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that Google was “distorting” its market by virtually blacklisting the website with its SafeSearch feature that Google introduced in 2009. It eliminates adult websites from search results as well as blurring explicit photos in image results. It’s an optional feature but comes as a default option from many internet providers.
Ann Summers, which also mentioned issues with search when it filed its accounts recently, said that its website was hidden from search results even for those customers directly looking for the company’s products.
“This is having a distorting effect on the market,” it wrote in a CMA submission seen by the newspaper. “For users with SafeSearch on, including those who have not explicitly chosen this feature, they cannot find us via Google Search, the biggest search engine.”
“Our lingerie product offering is similar to our competitors, but we are penalised where they are not,” Ann Summers said.
An Ann Summers spokesman said: “For years, Google SafeSearch has imposed restrictions that has reduced the visibility of our website in search engines, which has resulted in a greater volume of customers unable to find our website.
