Google Flight Search Not a Monopolist Move - Pot, Meet Kettle

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If I ran a huge general search engine like Google, I wouldn't put Kayak, Orbitz, Priceline, and other travel-focused search engines at the top of my list of rivals. I'd put Bing there. Bing bills itself as a decision engine. It started doing that at least as far back as May 2009. In a press release explaining its approach, Microsoft explained what it meant by this. “Microsoft's research identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas in which people wanted more assistance in making key decisions. The current state of Internet search isn't optimized for these tasks, but the Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these key customer scenarios. For example...In Bing Travel, the Rate key compares the location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides a color-coded key of the best values, and the Price Predictor actually helps consumers decide when to buy an airline ticket in order to get the lowest prices.”

That sounds great...and suspiciously similar to what Google is offering. Where on Bing can you find these tools? Right after the sponsored search results and right before the regular links – just like Google. In fact, Sullivan noted that back in July, the Wall Street Journal opined that Google's purchase of ITA was driven by Microsoft's innovative search moves. Here's the Journal quote: “In fact, some analysts see Google's move into travel as a direct reaction to the offerings at Bing, Microsoft's search engine. Some of Bing's features, like travel search, 'have put some pressure on Google' to innovate, wrote Douglas Anmuth at Barclays Capital.”

Why hasn't anyone complained about Bing's anti-competitive practices? Bing “has less than a quarter of Google's audience,” according to the Journal. Also, in March of last year, Bing and Kayak announced a formal partnership in which Kayak agreed to serve flight search results to Bing. So Kayak's hardly going to complain about Bing.

Kayak seems upset that Google won't link to it for free in its flight tool. Bing doesn't link to any of Kayak's rivals for free within its flight tool. But somehow, that's okay with Kayak, since it's getting all this traffic. Can you imagine the howls of outrage that would ensue if Google tried to partner with one of the travel search engines in the way that Bing did with Kayak?

In a sense, this actually happened – but with the airlines. Jeremy Wertheimer, who founded ITA and now serves as a Google vice president, noted that they would have liked to include booking links to online travel agencies. But they needed travel data, and the airlines refused to provide that data if the search engine included those booking links. That's why all of the booking links through Google's flight search tool take you directly to the appropriate airline's website. Looked at this way, Google is stuck between a rock and a hard place, and can't make anyone happy.

Even so, I can't call this a tempest in a teapot. Sullivan insists that it's unfair to accuse Google of anti-competitive behavior without acknowledging that its rivals are doing the exact same thing, and even have a head start. “The more that search engines start diving into providing direct transactions or being transaction brokers...the more any publisher should be concerned. But that problem isn't a Google-specific one and shouldn't be treated in that manner. Otherwise, potential abuses by Google get stopped but others are free to do the same.” He's right, but Google's size and market power might cause the courts to see things differently. It certainly has in the past, with different players.

I remember when Microsoft was accused of monopolist behavior by bundling its Internet Explorer browser with its operating system, so users would be disinclined to seek out and try other browsers – even when they could get those browsers for free. The software giant was leveraging its operating system to give it a leg up in another field. Is that what Google is doing here?

It's possible. But I also remember the fallout from that case. Even as it was tried in the courts, rival browsers appeared – and now we have Firefox, Chrome, and others, which many argue are superior to IE. I can't tell you whether we'd have those browsers today if the courts had not constrained Microsoft. I can tell you that it's not nearly as easy to put constraints on competitive innovation – whether it's at large corporations or small, scrappy start-ups – as many would lead you to believe.

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