Google’s Choice
A while back, Nick Carr quoted a New York Times article describing Google’s feelings towards default search engines in browsers (specifically the danger of Microsoft making MSN the default in IE). In the article, Marissa Mayer of Google says, “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.” Sounds good to me.
But then we have the Google Toolbar for IE that, in it’s current incarnation, automatically runs an executable as a background process that prevents changes to the default search engine. When a user finds the option to turn this off, they will also find that the executable continues to re-launch itself until manually deleted. Google states that the executable launching even after the user has turned off this feature is a bug, and that it will not prevent changes to the default search engine from occurring if the feature is disabled.
The original issue was that changing the default, even if it can be changed back in one or two clicks on the main browser interface (example), was such a powerful move that it would be unfair to Microsoft’s competitors. The fear is that users won’t bother to make that extra click, and thus passively grant Microsoft a monopoly on search by virtue of the dominance of its web browser. Very legitimate fear, in my opinion, but how can you on the one hand suggest that the method for changing search engines in IE is too hard to be fair, and then release something like the Google Toolbar for IE with the default-locking behavior described above?
