Microsoft has made a formal complaint against Google to the European Commission accusing the search and advertising giant of using various illegal methods to dominate the European search market.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, is likely best known to Reg readers for his role in protecting the software giant against competition and monopoly complaints, so we can only assume he knows what he's talking about.

His unsuccessful defence of the firm when it was accused of using APIs to protect its monopoly ended with the Commission hitting it with a €1.35bn fine.

Smith used a blog post to explain why Microsoft was asking its former nemesis for help in fighting Google.

He said that while Google serves about three-quarters of US searches in Europe, it has about 95 per cent of the market.

Smith said that Google's purchase of YouTube had resulted in "technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results".

Secondly he accused Google of blocking Windows Mobile phones from working properly with YouTube. He also accused the search behemoth of trying to block access to "orphan works" – books with unknown copyright holders.

Smith also accused Google of restricting access to advertising information from its ad-serving service.

Microsoft's Google complaint is here. We'll have more on this story later. ®