Edinburgh's Skyscanner, the largest travel website outside the US and the fastest-growing worldwide, needs a "cunning plan" to fend off the competitive might of Google, one of the UK leading e-commerce experts has warned.

Peter Mowforth, of e-commerce providers Indez, was responding to last week's announcement that web titan Google had introduced its flight comparison service to Europe. Previously available only in North America, it is now available in eight languages in the UK, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.

Skyscanner founder Gareth Williams has previously claimed that his site's head start in the flight comparison market, plus its strategic tie-ups in China and Russia, would save it from being crushed by the Google juggernaut.

Williams told the Sunday Herald in January: "I have every expectation that we will continue to show a better range of flights; also we have a lot of other partners and potential partners in other search engines."

However, Mowforth said: "An inevitable consequence of the way Google works is that the distance between manufacturers/brand owners on one side and end-user customers on the other is any business that tries to sit between these two will progressively be forced to exit.

"It's - just a consequence of how the web works. Now that Google has now entered the European market providing flight comparison data. I guess Skyscanner needs a cunning plan."