Thursday, June 21, 2007
Google Whines to Government About Vista Search
Posted by Jason Dunn in "NEWS" @ 08:00 AM
"In agreeing to make what could be described technically as a minor change to the way it handles its options for consumer desktop search, Microsoft last night may have made its most symbolically significant statement to date with regard to its current stance in the technology market: It backed down, in response to a complaint from Google that its placement of desktop search capabilities within Windows Vista constituted a breach of its antitrust settlement agreement with the US and states' governments regarding middleware."
There's a lot that I respect about Google, but today I believe they've shamed themselves. Rather than making Google Desktop Search a better product and competing against Microsoft, they've instead gone crying to the government saying that Microsoft did something unfair by enhancing the search features in Windows. The operating system has been able to search going as far back as Windows 95 (I don't think there was a search function in Windows 3.1, was there?), but the search function was inefficient because it only searched when you asked it to. The smart way to search is to keep an ongoing index of content, and search that.
Can you imagine how slow Google would be if, when you requested a search, it sent out its search bots and tried to find you the results in real-time? That would be ridiculous. Yet that's exactly what Google expects Microsoft to have kept doing with Windows - they're calling the enhanced search functions in Vista "middleware", meaning not part of the operating system. Google thinks that the search function in Vista, which builds an index and searches that, isn't a core function of the operating system and is instead a "product" that competes with Google Desktop Search, and that's somehow unfair.
I haven't installed Google Desktop Search under Vista, but I did try it on Windows XP, and I didn't like it - I preferred the MSN/Windows Desktop Search client because it wasn't tied to the browser and just made more sense to me. Google can't make a desktop application to save their life. Now, if for some reasons Google Desktop search can't install properly under Vista because of something that Microsoft has done and it's impossible for Google to work around it, then perhaps Google has a case here. But the way I read it, Google is upset that Microsoft enhanced desktop search under Vista, and that's just whining.
There's a lot that I respect about Google, but today I believe they've shamed themselves. Rather than making Google Desktop Search a better product and competing against Microsoft, they've instead gone crying to the government saying that Microsoft did something unfair by enhancing the search features in Windows. The operating system has been able to search going as far back as Windows 95 (I don't think there was a search function in Windows 3.1, was there?), but the search function was inefficient because it only searched when you asked it to. The smart way to search is to keep an ongoing index of content, and search that.
Can you imagine how slow Google would be if, when you requested a search, it sent out its search bots and tried to find you the results in real-time? That would be ridiculous. Yet that's exactly what Google expects Microsoft to have kept doing with Windows - they're calling the enhanced search functions in Vista "middleware", meaning not part of the operating system. Google thinks that the search function in Vista, which builds an index and searches that, isn't a core function of the operating system and is instead a "product" that competes with Google Desktop Search, and that's somehow unfair.
I haven't installed Google Desktop Search under Vista, but I did try it on Windows XP, and I didn't like it - I preferred the MSN/Windows Desktop Search client because it wasn't tied to the browser and just made more sense to me. Google can't make a desktop application to save their life. Now, if for some reasons Google Desktop search can't install properly under Vista because of something that Microsoft has done and it's impossible for Google to work around it, then perhaps Google has a case here. But the way I read it, Google is upset that Microsoft enhanced desktop search under Vista, and that's just whining.
