We attacked Google and forced them to pay out £2 billion

“Google has essentially disappeared us from the internet.”

Launch days. For many startup founders, they’re both exciting and terrifying, but they don’t get much worse than what Shivaun Raff and her husband Adam experienced.

It was June 2006 and the couple’s groundbreaking price comparison website Foundem – which they had sacrificed high-paying jobs and built from scratch – had just gone fully live.

They didn’t know it at the time, but that day, and the days that followed, would mark the beginning of the end for their company.

Foundem received a search penalty from Google, prompted by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the website far down the search results lists for relevant queries such as ‘price comparison’ and ‘comparison purchases’.

It meant the couple’s website, which charged a fee when customers clicked through to other websites on their product listings, struggled to make money.

“We were monitoring our pages and seeing how they were ranking, and then almost immediately we saw them all plummet,” says Adam.

While launch day for Foundem didn’t go according to plan, it would lead to the start of something else: a 15-year legal battle that culminated in a then- record fine of €2.4 billion for Google, which is alleged to have abused its market dominance.

The case is being hailed as a milestone in the global regulation of Big Tech.

Google fought this June 2017 ruling for seven years, but in September this year the European Supreme Court – the European Court of Justice – dismissed its appeal.

In conversation with Radio 4’s The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that they initially thought their website’s stuttering start was simply a mistake.

“We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been falsely detected as spam,” said Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be reversed.”

“If you don’t get traffic, you have no business,” Adam, 58, adds.

The couple sent numerous requests to Google to remove the restriction, but more than two years later nothing had changed and they said they received no response.

Meanwhile, their website scored “completely normal” on other search engines, but according to Shivaun that didn’t matter much since “everyone uses Google”.

The couple would later discover that their site wasn’t the only one harmed by Google: By the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017, there were about 20 plaintiffs, including Kelkoo, Trivago, and Yelp.

Adam, who built a career in supercomputing, says he had the “eureka moment” for Foundem when he smoked a cigarette outside his previous employer’s office.

At the time, price comparison websites were still in their infancy and they all specialized in one particular product. But Foundem was different because it let customers compare a wide range of products – from clothing to flights.

“Nobody else came close to this,” says Shivaun, who himself had been a software consultant for several major global brands.

In its 2017 judgment, the European Commission ruled that Google had done so illegally advertised its own price comparison service in search results while downgrading those of competitors.

But a decade earlier – when Foundem launched – Adam said he had no reason to believe Google was deliberately anti-competitive towards online shopping. “They weren’t really serious players,” he says.

But in late 2008, the couple began to suspect foul play.

It was three weeks before Christmas and the couple received a message warning that their website was suddenly loading slowly. They thought it was a cyber attack, “but actually everyone just came to our website,” laughs Adam.

Channel 5’s The Gadget Show had just named Foundem the best price comparison website in Britain.

“And that was really important,” Shivaun explains, “because we then contacted Google and said, look, it’s certainly not to the benefit of your users if they make it impossible for them to find us.

“And that still got from Google, not a complete denial, but a de facto ‘swamp’.”

“That was the moment we knew, OK, we have to fight,” Adam says.

The couple went to the press, with limited success, and took their case to regulators in Britain, the US and Brussels.

It was in the latter case – at the European Commission (EC) – that the case finally took off, with the launch of an antitrust investigation in November 2010. The couple’s first meeting with regulators took place in a portable booth in Brussels .

“One of the things they said was, if this is a systemic problem, why are you the first people we see?” Shivaun recalls. “We said we’re not 100% sure, but we suspect people are scared because all businesses on the Internet are essentially dependent on Google for the lifeline that is their traffic.”

The couple were in a hotel room in Brussels, just a few hundred meters from the commission building, when competition commissioner Margarethe Vestager finally announced the verdict they, and other shopping websites, had been waiting for.

But there were no popping champagne corks. Their focus then turned to ensuring that the EC implemented its decision.

“I think it was a shame for Google to do this to us,” says Shivaun. “We both grew up believing we can make a difference, and we really don’t like bullies.”

Even Google’s latest defeat in the case last month did not spell the end for the couple.

They believe that Google’s behavior remains anti-competitive and that the European Commission is investigating this. In March this year, the commission opened an investigation under the new Digital Markets Act into Google’s parent company, Alphabet, over whether the company still favors its own goods and services in search results.

A Google spokesperson said: “The CJEU judgment (in 2024) only affects the way we showed product results from 2008-2017.

“The changes we implemented in 2017 to comply with the European Commission’s Shopping Decision have been working successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks across more than 800 price comparison services.

“For this reason, we continue to vigorously contest Foundem’s claims and will do so when the matter is heard in court.”

The Raffs are also pursuing a civil damages claim against Google, due to begin in the first half of 2026. But when, or if, there is a final victory for the pair, it will likely be a Pyrrhic victory – they were forced to close Founded in 2016.

The long battle against Google has also been tough for them. “I think if we had known it would take as many years as it turned out to be, we might not have made the same choice,” Adam admits.