Browser War Hypocrisy

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Google is complaining to the anti-trust department that Microsoft plans and having a search box, which by default is set to search MSN, with it’s new IE7. This version of IE has been available as a beta download since last week and Microsoft plans to include it with the Windows Vista operating system scheduled to be released in January 2007.

Google’s complaint against Microsoft is that by making MSN the default search this gives them an unfair advantage in the search wars. Marissa Mayer, VP of search products at Google said,

“The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services. We don’t think it’s right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose.”

Yet in both the Opera and FireFox browsers, the latter being one heavily supported by Google, even to the point of allowing them to be the first ever non-Google company to received a link off the Google home page, both have similar search boxes which are set to Google search by default.

Mayer said that Google would support unfettered choice on those as well.

How about Google take the lead here and demand that FireFox and Opera remove Google from being the default search before demanding that Microsoft removes itself as the default from its own browser. Talk about hypocrisy!

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Tags: Google, MSN, Search Engines, SEM News & Trends
Posted in Search & Marketing