“Google basically wiped us off the internet.”

Release days. They’re equal parts thrilling and terrifying for many startup founders, but they don’t get much worse than those experienced by Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam.

It was June 2006 and the couple’s ground-breaking price comparison site, Foundem – one they had sacrificed high-paying jobs for and built from the ground up – had just gone live.

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

Foundem was hit with a Google search penalty, determined by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the site down the search results lists for relevant queries like ‘price comparison’ and ‘comparison shopping’.

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

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

Although 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 the record €2.4bn (£2bn) fine for Google, which was deemed to have abused its market dominance.

The case was hailed as a landmark moment in global Big Tech regulation.

Google spent seven years fighting this verdict, issued in June 2017, but in September this year, Europe’s highest court – the European Court of Justice – rejected its appeals.

Speaking to Radio 4’s The Bottom Line In their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that at first, they thought their website’s shaky start was simply a mistake.

“Initially we thought this was collateral damage, that we were being falsely detected as spam,” says Shivaun, 55. “I assumed we had to climb to the right place and it would be overturned.”

“If you’re denied traffic, then you’ve got no business,” adds Adam, 58.

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

Meanwhile, their site “ranks perfectly fine” on other search engines, but that didn’t really matter, according to Shivaun, because “everyone uses Google.”

The couple would later discover that their site wasn’t the only one to be disadvantaged by Google – by the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017, there were around 20 complainants, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.

Adam, who has built a career in supercomputing, says he had his “eureka moment” for Foundem while smoking a cigarette outside his former employer’s offices.

Then price comparison websites were in their infancy and each one specialized in a certain product. But Foundem was different because it allowed customers to compare a wide range of products – from clothes to flights.

“No one else has come close to this,” says Shivaun, who herself had been a software consultant for several major global brands.

In its 2017 ruling, the European Commission found that Google had illegally promoted its own comparison shopping service in search results while downgrading those of its competitors.

Ten years before that, though—when he launched Foundem—Adam says he had no reason to believe Google was deliberately anti-competitive with online shopping. “They weren’t serious players,” he says.

But by late 2008, the couple had begun to suspect foul play.

It was three weeks before Christmas and the two received a warning message that their website had suddenly become slow to load. They thought it was a cyber attack, “but it was really just that everyone started visiting our site,” laughs Adam.

Channel 5’s The Gadget Show has just named Foundem the best price comparison site in the UK.

“And that was really important,” Shivaun explains, “because then we reached out to Google and said, look, it’s definitely not to your users’ advantage to make it impossible for them to find us.

“And that’s what he still got from Google, not a complete ignore, but basically a ‘bog off.’

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

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

In the latter – with the European Commission (EC) – 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 percent sure, but we suspect people are afraid because all businesses on the Internet essentially rely on Google for the force that is their traffic.”

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

But there was no popping of champagne corks. Their focus then turned to ensuring that the EC implements its decision.

“I think it was unfortunate for Google to do it to us,” says Shivaun. “We were both brought up maybe under the delusion that we could make a difference and we really don’t like bullies.”

Even Google’s final defeat in the case last month didn’t spell the end for the couple.

They believe Google’s behavior remains anti-competitive and the CE is looking into it. In March of this year, under its new Digital Markets Act, the commission opened an investigation into Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to determine whether it continues to favor its own goods and services in search results.

A Google spokesperson said: “The CJEU (European Court of Justice) ruling (from 2024) only concerns how we displayed product results from 2008-2017.

“The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Shopping Commission’s decision have been working successfully for over seven years, generating billions of clicks for over 800 comparison shopping services.

“For this reason, we continue to vigorously contest the claims made by Foundem and will do so when the case is heard by the courts.”

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

The long battle against Google was also exhausting. “I think if we had known they were going to take as many years as they turned out to be, we might not have made the same choice,” admits Adam.