Internet search giant Google on Monday responded to accusations that it promotes its own results over that of rivals.

Google said the search engine was for users, and not for websites. The search firm added that its algorithm was designed to pick out the best answer for the user, and the best answer often happened to be its own services. Google responded following the Wall Street Journal published interviews with some websites that have been blaming Google of favoring its own services like that of Place Search.

Well-known firms like that of TripAdvisor, Yelp, Citysearch and WebMD are some of the many which said that they were being tenaciously edged out. Jay Herratti from CityGrid Media said that Google was competing with them for the same Web traffic as well as the same advertising revenue. He claimed that Google's actions were aggressively putting their sites at a disadvantage. Google defended its stance explaining, "We still provide the usual Web results linking to great sites; we simply organize those results around places to make it much faster to find what you're looking for."

However, Google must know that it dominance in the market adds to its responsibility to ensure a fair and honest service to web users.