Google Ireland and Google France have agreed to pay a 1.1 million euro fine amid a probe that found Google's hotel rankings could be misleading for customers, France's finance ministry and fraud watchdog said.
The American company is accused of having created its own rating system for hotels, which uses stars and features its own algorithm, according to reports.
However, French regulation specifies that such ratings systems may only be established by the government and that only the state is authorised to use them.
This is not the first time that Google has had to pay a fine in France. Last December, the American company received a record fine of 100 million euros imposed by the CNIL (National Commission for Informatics and Liberties) for "having placed advertising cookies on the computers of users of the search engine google.fr without prior consent or satisfactory information".
