Google stranglehold on search pushes companies into dead zones

Where’s the best place to hide a body? The second page of a Google search.

The gallows humour shows that people rarely look beyond the first few results of a search, but Lee Griffin isn’t laughing.

In the 13 years since he co-founded British price comparison website GoCompare, the 41-year-old has tried to keep his company at the top of search results, doing everything from using a For Dummies guide in the early days to later hiring a team of engineers, marketers and mathematicians. That’s put him on the front lines of a battle challenging the dominance of Alphabet Inc’s Google in the search market — with regulators in the U.S. and across Europe taking a closer look.