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Microsoft Behind Google Complaints To EC
justice4all writes to share that some of the recent complaints to the European Commission about Google have apparently been coming from Microsoft. "A lawyer for Microsoft confirmed that the software giant told the US Department of Justice and the European Commission how Google’s business practices may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising. [...] 'Google’s algorithms learn less common search terms better than others because many more people are conducting searches on these terms on Google. These and other network effects make it hard for competing search engines to catch up. Microsoft’s well-received Bing search engine is addressing this challenge by offering innovations in areas that are less dependent on volume. But Bing needs to gain volume too, in order to increase the relevance of search results for less common search terms.'"
Giving Google the monopoly now would be the worst thing to do.
And would you like to know who has given Google their dominant position? You. Me. And Everyone else that thought that Yahoo, Microsoft, Excite, Alta Vista and the rest sucked. Google earned their way to the top by providing a better product. It wasn't given to them by government fiat.
Unlike some markets where immense cost is a barrier to entry, there is no such limitation for a new search engine to begin crawling the internet with their own algorithms and produce search results. Sure, you need servers and disk space, but ANY business endeavor will require some resources. Google's results were not so much superior amounts of hardware, but better algorithms. They simply did it better.
And now they are getting complaints that they are too successful? Bunch of communists.
Bearded Dragon
Could you perhaps provide an example of a search query that Google does substantially better than Bing?
Bing's problems are well known.
Could you provide a reason you've been living under a rock for the past 6 months, but suddenly decided to pop out to troll for MS?
You're not tied into Google in any way and can easily block them for good by pointing their domain to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file. Can you tell me how to remove IE from my XP or Vista? Hell you can't even really truly remove it from Windows 7 and that's only in the EU. Or maybe why some MS apps, like MSN Messenger choose to ignore my browser choice and open something in IE. I've never had such a thing happen to me with Google.
The way they've implemented their analytics software makes it dead easy to block. Google even lets me use Bing as my search engine in Chrome. It's 3rd on the list, just after Yahoo and not hidden away further down like Google is on IE if you want to pick a new search provider. This only covers the tip of the iceberg and doesn't go into the efforts MS has made, up until recently, to lock in documents to Windows or trying to break Java to make their version different or all the other shit they've done.
Google is by no means perfect but they have a long way to go before catching up to Microsoft in the shitty tactics department.