David vs. Goliath: How Foundem’s Founders took on Google and changed Big Tech forever

“Google essentially disappeared us from the internet.” That’s how Shivaun Raff describes the start of what would become a 15-year legal battle against one of the world’s largest tech companies. For Shivaun and her husband, Adam, launching their price comparison website, Foundem, in June 2006 was supposed to be a milestone. Instead, it marked the beginning of a grueling struggle for visibility and survival.

On launch day, Foundem was quickly hit by a Google search penalty, triggered by an automated spam filter. Suddenly, Foundem’s rankings for crucial search terms like “price comparison” plummeted, devastating its chances of gaining traffic and revenue. “We were monitoring our pages and how they were ranking, and then we saw them all plummet almost immediately,” Adam recalls. Foundem’s ability to charge fees for clicks on their product listings was severely hampered.

Initially, Shivaun and Adam assumed it was a mistake, a simple case of Foundem being incorrectly flagged as spam. “We thought we’d just escalate it to the right person, and it would be overturned,” Shivaun said in an interview. But their appeals to Google were met with silence, leaving Foundem’s visibility crippled on the search engine that dominated internet traffic.

Meanwhile, Foundem continued to rank normally on other search engines, but as Shivaun pointed out, “everyone’s using Google.” The lack of response and the ongoing suppression of their website led the couple to suspect deliberate foul play. It wasn’t until years later, when the European Commission (EC) launched an investigation, that they learned Foundem wasn’t alone. Other sites, like Kelkoo and Yelp, had also suffered from Google’s tactics.

Adam, who came up with the idea for Foundem during a break outside his previous job in supercomputing, envisioned a platform that would allow users to compare a wide range of products, from flights to electronics. At the time, other price comparison sites focused on single categories, giving Foundem a unique edge. “No one else was anywhere close to this,” Shivaun said.

Yet by 2008, after The Gadget Show named Foundem the best price comparison site in the UK, they began to suspect that Google might be blocking competition in favor of its own services. They reached out to Google to question the suppression, but were effectively told to “bog off,” Shivaun recalls. “That was the moment we knew we had to fight.”

Their fight wasn’t easy. After getting little traction with the UK and US regulators, they turned to the European Commission. It was a breakthrough, leading to the EC’s landmark antitrust investigation, which in 2017 culminated in a record-breaking €2.4 billion fine for Google, which had favored its own shopping service over competitors. Google resisted the ruling for seven years, but in September 2024, the European Court of Justice upheld the fine, marking a significant moment in global tech regulation.

Despite the victory, the Raffs are still fighting. Earlier this year, the EC launched another investigation under its new Digital Markets Act, examining whether Google’s parent company, Alphabet, continues to favor its own services in search results. The couple also plans to pursue a civil damages claim in 2026, though they recognize that winning may not restore what was lost—Foundem was forced to close in 2016. Reflecting on the ordeal, Adam admitted, “If we had known it was going to take quite as many years as it did, we might not have made the same choice.”