Washington: US search giant Google has admitted that its staff had ''improperly'' accessed its Kenyan rival’s database to boost its business.

The company said it is "mortified" to know that its staff illegally entered the business directory of a Kenyan firm, Mocality to sell a competing product to the latter’s customers, and vowed to immediately begin probing the incident.

“We were mortified to learn that a team of people working on a Google project improperly used Mocality''s data and misrepresented our relationship with Mocality to encourage customers to create new websites," The Guardian quoted Google Europe product and engineering vice-president, Nelson Mattos as saying.
 
"We''ve already unreservedly apologised to Mocality. We''re still investigating exactly how this happened, and as soon as we have all the facts, we''ll be taking the appropriate action with the people involved," he added.

It is not yet clear whether the staff involved in fraud were employees or contractors.

The incident became public after Mocality Chief Executive Stefan Magdalinski accused Google of "telling untruths" and a "human-powered, systematic, months-long, fraudulent ... attempt to undermine our business” in a blogpost.

Magdalinski said he had suspected the alleged malpractice after Google launched a rival initiative, "Getting Kenyan Businesses Online", which offered to help Kenyan businesses build a website.

Mocality, subsequently, started receiving calls inquiring about the procedure to build the website– a service never offered by the firm.

Mocality detected the fraud by conducting a "sting" operation, changing some telephone numbers on its business directory to the contact details of its own call centre.(ANI)