“Google essentially disappeared us from the internet.”

Launch days. They’re equal parts thrilling and terrifying for many commence-up business founders, but they don’t get much worse than the one Shivaun Raff and her husband, Adam, experienced.

It was June 2006 and the couple’s trailblazing worth comparison website Foundem – one they had sacrificed well-paid jobs for and built from scratch – had just gone fully live.

They didn’t recognize it at the period but that day, and those that followed, would mark the beginning of the complete for their corporation.

Foundem had been hit by a Google search penalty, prompted by one of the search engine’s automatic spam filters. It pushed the website way down the lists of search results for relevant queries like “worth comparison” and “comparison shopping”.

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

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

While the launch day for Foundem didn’t leave to schedule, it would navigator to the commence of something else – a 15-year legal battle that culminated in a then record €2.4bn (£2bn) fine for Google, which was deemed to have abused its economy dominance.

The case has been hailed as a landmark instant in the global regulation of large Tech.

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

Speaking to Radio 4’s The final profit in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that at first, they thought their website’s faltering commence had simply been a mistake.

“We initially thought this was guarantee damage, that we had been untrue positive detected as spam,” says Shivaun, 55. “We just assumed we had to escalate to the correct place and it would be overturned.”

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

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

Meanwhile, their website was “ranking completely normally” on other search engines, but that didn’t really matter, according to Shivaun, as “everyone’s using Google”.

The couple would later discover that their site was not the only one to have been put at a drawback by Google – by the period the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017 there were around 20 claimants, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp.

Adam, who had built a career in supercomputing, says he had the “eureka instant” for Foundem while smoking a cigarette outside the offices of his previous employer.

Then, worth comparison websites were in their infancy, and each specialised in one particular product. But Foundem was different because it let customers contrast a large range of products – from clothes to flights.

“No-one else was anywhere close to this,” beams Shivaun, who herself had been a software consultant for several major global brands.

In its 2017 judgement, the European percentage found that Google had illegally promoted its own comparison shopping service in search results, whilst demoting those of competitors.

Ten years before that, though – when Foundem launched – Adam says he had no rationale to assume Google was being deliberately anti-competitive over online shopping. “They weren’t really solemn players,” he says.

But by the complete of 2008, the couple had started to suspect foul play.

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

Channel 5’s The Gadget display had just named Foundem the best worth comparison website in the UK.

“And that was really significant,” Shivaun explains, “because we then reached out to Google and said, look, surely it’s not benefiting your users to make it unfeasible for them to discover us.

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

“That was the instant we knew, OK, we require to fight,” says Adam.

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

It was in the latter – with the European percentage (EC) – that the case eventually took off, with the launch of an antitrust investigation in November 2010. The couple’s first conference with the regulators took place in a portable cabin in Brussels.

“One of the things they said was if this is a systemic issue, why are you the first people we’re seeing?” Shivaun recalls. “We said we’re not 100% sure, but we suspect people are afraid, because all businesses on the internet essentially depend on Google for the lifeblood that is their traffic.”

The couple were in a hotel room in Brussels, only a few hundred yards from the percentage building, when competition commissioner Margarethe Vestager finally announced the verdict that they, and other shopping websites, had been waiting for.

But there was no popping of champagne corks. Their focus then turned to making sure the EC enforced its selection.

“I guess it was unfortunate for Google that they did it to us,” Shivaun says. “We’ve both been brought up maybe under the delusion that we can make a difference, and we really don’t like bullies.”

Even Google’s final loss in the case last month did not spell the complete for the couple.

They depend Google’s conduct remains anti-competitive and the EC is looking into it. In March this year, under its recent Digital Markets Act, the percentage opened an investigation into Google’s parent corporation, Alphabet, over whether it continues to preference its own goods and services in search results.

A spokesperson for Google said: “The CJEU [European Court of Justice] judgment [in 2024] only relates to how we showed product results from 2008-2017.

“The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European percentage’s Shopping selection have worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services.

“For this rationale, we continue to strongly contest the claims made by Foundem and will do so when the case is considered by the courts.”

The Raffs are also pursuing a civil damages claim against Google, which is due to commence in the first half of 2026. But when, or if, a final win comes for the couple it will likely be a Pyrrhic one – they were forced to close Foundem in 2016.

The long fight against Google has been gruelling for them, too. “I ponder if we had known it was going to be quite as many years as it turned out to be we might not have made the same selection,” Adam admits.