Expedia has accused Google of  'using its extraordinary power to manipulate users and foreclose the ability of other sites to compete'.

Company lawyer Tom Barnett made the accusation in a statement to a US Government Senate Sub-Committee investigating online competition. The main thrust of Barnett's argument is that because Google is now competing directly with many of its major advertisers through products such as Google Flight Search it now has a fundamental conflict of interest – one that has the potential to hurt customers such as Expedia.

"Google has undergone a fundamental transformation in its business that has enormous consequences for competition on the Internet. Originally, Google was purely a search engine with the incentive to direct each user as quickly as possible to the websites most likely to be most relevant to the user's query.

More recently, however, Google has expanded into other products and services that include the provision of information (such Google Places, Google News, Google Finance, or YouTube) and specialized "vertical" search services that operate in a specific area (such as Google Maps, Google Product Search, or Google Flight Search).

"Google has been highly successful in many of these areas, often replacing the leading company (such as MapQuest) in an extraordinarily short period of time. This expansion has several important implications.

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