Tuesday, May 02, 2006

Search Engine Wars

I was amazed to read a news item titled "New Microsoft browser raises Google's hackles" today. Google is crying foul because MSN Search is the default search engine in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, I had noticed this thing long time back when I downloaded the beta version of IE7. Google has tried to counter this by modifying the appearance of the Google Search homepage when when opened in IE7, the page looks like this:



(Look carefully at the top right corner, you will notice something extra)

Google may be crying foul now but it has enjoyed this position in other browsers like Firefox without users noticing it (have you ever noticed that MSN search is not even available in Firefox?) but the only difference is that the other search engines are "also available" for the users (if they manage to discover them) Microsoft should do the same thing, it should hide all the search engines (including Google and Yahoo) under the MSN Search Box just like Firefox and 90% of the users won't even discover their presence in IE7. I am not trying to take sides here but if the Google Gang wants to play fair, it must treat the others fairly too.



But then, everything is fair in love and Search engine wars....long live the M$ vs Google battle.


Cheers!

4 comments:

AGRINEER said...

but bhai mere u have option to add msn as a search engine in to it.. so what big deal...and waise bhi east r west GOOGLE is the best

Anurag Saxena said...

@Agrineer: Can an average Internet user who type a sentence in 5 minutes using two fingers do that? The question is not "Which is the Best Search Engine?", even I support Google but if Google wants fair play, it must play fair too :) Same goes for MyCrowSoft.

Pooja Mayer said...

everybody is watching at MS and google ....I think Yahoo is a dark horse. Yahoo my web search is fundu.and I just love the entire services offered by Yahoo.

Akash said...

Everything is fair in War - be it Terrestrial or in the Cyber Space !! Anyways as TOI today said - Microsoft is the OS for the PCs and Google is the OS for the Internet.