In a late Tuesday blog post, Internet search giant Google has revealed that antitrust authorities at the European Union have initiated preliminary-stage antitrust investigations into its supposedly competition-thwarting tactics.

The EU antitrust inquiry against Google follows complaints by three European Internet companies - Foundem, a UK-based price comparison site; French legal search engine, ejustice. fr; and a German search site, Ciao. The inquiry will basically pertain to the complaints that Google follows a practice whereby sites of the Internet competitors are `unfairly' ranked on Google sites.

Elaborating about the complaints against Google, the company's senior competition counsel Julia Holtz said that while Foundem and ejustice. fr have complained that Google's algorithms gave a lower ranking to their sites in Google's results, Microsoft's German subsidiary Ciao has complained about Google's terms and conditions.

With Holtz elucidating that ranking Web sites is a "very hard computer science problem to crack," Google added in its blog post that it operates its business "in the interests of users and partners, as well as in line with European competition law."

Google further added: "We always try to listen carefully if someone has a real concern and we work hard to put our users' interests first and to compete fair and square in the market. We believe our business practices reflect those commitments."