- June 1st, 2010 by Marc Flores
Microsoft never ceases to amaze us when it offers its opinions on the tech industry. Last week, it told the FCC that a single search provider was becoming too big (cough, Google, cough) and that its search results may serve the company’s own interests instead of the interests of the users. Funny, coming from Microsoft, whose dominant operating system software holds 92 percent of the market share, but it does have a point. Are we getting natural search results when we type our queries into Google’s search bar? Or are we getting paid results, or results that Google wants us to see?
The problem is that it’s hard to tell, and that’s the point Microsoft is trying to make. With Google completely overshadowing any competing search engines, if Bing and Yahoo! are, in fact, really competition, the search giant might be casually injecting its own biases in our search results without our knowing. Does the government need to watch over Google for this reason? Microsoft thinks so.
“For Internet-based media, the existence of a dominant search provider raises the risk that consumers will be exposed disproportionately to the content and views of the dominant provider or its preferred partners,” says Microsoft.
Or perhaps Microsoft is just miffed that it’s not seeing greater market share for Bing, its own search engine. Hell, it hasn’t enjoyed the same kind of dominance that it has in the operating system market. Its mobile efforts have been a failure, and that is huge. As Apple and Google pick up and grow, Microsoft can’t afford to fall behind. And now Bing, well, honestly — how many of you out there go straight to Bing when you need to perform a web search?
It will be interesting to see how this will play out, however, because there are no set guidelines for this business. Google isn’t obligated to do anything about it, either, no matter what competitors want and demand from the government. Before that even happens, though, we have to determine whether Google is stacking the deck in its favor when it comes to our searches, or if Microsoft’s cries are nothing more than sour grapes.
via Ars Technica
