There was encouraging news for the growing army of Google-haters yesterday when a leading internet advertising researcher suggested that the search engine’s stranglehold on online promotions was looser than he had expected.

Bill Tancer, a research analyst at Hitwise, the internet research firm, said that eBay’s decision to pull all its advertising from Google in the US had had only a small impact on the “traffic” flowing from the search engine to the online auctioneer’s site.

Some 9.6 per cent of eBay visitors came from Google on Tuesday, the first full day that the boycott was in effect, compared with 10.6 per cent on the previous Tuesday, Mr Tancer said.

“Before I pulled the data, I was expecting a bigger drop given the drastic removal of sponsored listing ads by eBay,” he said.

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He added that that the impact of eBay’s advertising withdrawal was reduced by the fact that 25 per cent of users visiting the internet auctioneer from Google do so after searching for eBay, rather than by clicking on one of the “sponsored links” that appear next to other search results.

The data suggests that Google may be less powerful than people thought, at a time when the search engine is seeking to widen its empire – and drawing fresh criticism almost every day as a result of its perceived growing dominance.

eBay’s decision to pull its advertising with Google came after it learnt of the search giant’s plan to gatecrash its user conference in Boston this week to promote CheckOut, a rival to eBay’s PayPal payment service.

Google later cancelled the party following eBay’s advertising moratorium.

These aggressive sales tactics have helped to cultivate the image of Google as a corporate bully with big brother tendencies.

The party it planned came just days after a report by Privacy International, the London-based advocacy group, labelled the search engine “hostile to privacy”.

The draft report identified several companies as posing substantial threats to privacy, with Google ranking as the most hostile to privacy because it keeps data on user searches for months after they have been conducted. eBay was found to be one of the least hostile.

Privacy is a big concern to politicians and consumer groups alike. The US Federal Trade Commission has decided for the first time to include “consumer protection” matters in its investigation into the competition issues surrounding Google’s planned $3.1 billion (£1.6 billion) takeover of DoubleClick, the online advertising company. The FTC will shortly decide whether to extend its initial review of the deal into a more formal inquiry.

Meanwhile, other groups are fighting back as they see Google threatening to take large slices of their business.

After Google spent nearly $1.7 billion on YouTube, the video sharing website, companies such as Viacom, which had previously largely turned a blind eye to copyright issues, began to demand recompense.

Yesterday it emerged that eBay will cut selling fees for its cheapest items and will not raise fixed-income fees this summer as competition from the likes of Google lured away users. Between June 19 and August 5 eBay transaction fees from items that sell for $25 or less will be cut to 4.5 per cent from 5.25 per cent.

Multibillion-dollar battlers

–– Google’s shares were priced at $85 when it was floated on Nasdaq in August 2004, giving the California-based search company a value of $23 billion. Yesterday its shares were trading at just over $506, making Google worth almost $158 billion. Last August they were $363.
–– eBay was founded in 1995 in California by Pierre Omidyar. It was floated in September 1998 at $18 a share and was worth $714 million. Within a week the shares had risen to $143, valuing the company at more than $5 billion but that was before the dot-com crash. eBay is now valued at $43 billion and yesterday its shares were worth $31.93

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