Two news stories last week really helped to bring home just how much of a high stakes battle the search engine wars have become. A complaint from Google was quickly followed by rumors of talks between Yahoo and Microsoft. Who knows what will happen next?
The focus of the war is advertising money, of course, and that means a lot to all three major search engines. It means even more to Google than to the other two, perhaps, because practically all of its revenue comes from advertising. It must have been the need to protect that income that inspired the search engine giant to complain informally to antitrust regulators in both the United States and the European Union.
The focus of Google’s complaint is Microsoft. Specifically, Google is very unhappy with the upcoming version of Internet Explorer. The release is currently available in a test version. As with most newer web browsers these days, the latest version of IE 7 features a box in which users can enter text to automatically do a web search without leaving their current web page. Users can set the search engine, but Google argues that it’s currently, and unfairly, set up to preferentially use Microsoft’s own engine.
That’s not all, though. According to Google, the software giant has set up IE 7 so that it is difficult to change to a different search engine in that box. Microsoft disputes this claim, and says that it’s easy to change the search engine used in that box. Gary Schare, director of product management for IE, stated that “MSN has a certain amount of (market) share. This is not designed to change this. This is designed to essentially keep the status quo.”
Keeping the status quo, though, would be doing much better than Microsoft has done lately on the search engine front. MSN Search’s share of search queries fielded has slipped by several percentage points over the past year, while Google and Yahoo! have both gained market share. So why is Google worried?
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