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For some time now, a sort of "Google vs. Everybody" situation has been developing in Germany.  The bad news for the search giant is that, as four online marketing agencies have prepared to team up, the situation’s continuing to take shape, and the European Commission is fine with it.

G + J Electronic Media Service, IP Deutschland, SevenOne Media, and Tomorrow Focus Portal intend to work together in the realm of online display advertising.  A statement issued today explained that they will "develop and sell a new product to allow advertisers to reach better defined target groups of Internet users whose profiles would be created based on anonymous data collected throughout a large network of participating websites."

Individually, these organizations all appear to be rather important and at least fairly successful.  Together, they should represent quite a force.

So here’s the extra-noteworthy part: the statement later added, "The Commission concluded that the proposed concentration was unlikely to raise competition concerns given the parties’ low market shares in online advertising and the presence of strong competitors like Google."

We’ll try to keep an eye on how this joint project proceeds.  Meanwhile, a big hat tip goes to Robert Andrews.

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December’s supposed to be a month of miracles, and – at least in terms of gaining market share – Google seems to have pulled off a minor one.  New Nielsen stats show that the search giant increased the distance between itself and competitors by a considerable amount.

Nielsen put Google’s share of the U.S. search market in November at 65.4 percent.   That number increased to 67.3 percent for December, which works out to a gain of 1.9 percent.  Swings like that aren’t without precedent, but tend not to happen on a month-to-month basis.

Yahoo, meanwhile, lost share.  Its numbers slipped from 15.3 percent to 14.4 percent between November and December.  And Bing suffered a similar fate, with Nielsen recording a drop from 15.3 percent to 14.4 percent.

So it looks like it’s time to once again ask: how high and low can Google and its competitors’ market shares go, respectively?  And is there a point at which Google’s gains will work against it?  Opinion pieces about the "Microsoft of search" tend not to be complimentary, after all, and antitrust regulators are already growing uneasy.

As always, we’ll check back in on the situation next month.

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