Google fights for his place in IE7

Money rules the world. Google has fired off a complaint to both the US Justice Deoartment and the European Commission (EC) over Microsoft making MSN Search the default search engine in the new version of its dominant Internet Explorer browser, IE7. Internet Explorer currently has 85% market share, a share that is slowly being eroded by Mozilla Firefox and, to a lesser extent Opera from Opera Software. The main reason for this complaint is the presence of Google AdSense ads in search results, which is the main stream of income for Google.

At present, Google is the default search engine in both Firefox and Opera web browsers but Google has to pay for the privilege. Google is arguing that Microsoft is engaging in anti-competitive practice by bundling its own search engine with its browser. Microsoft has retorted that the default search engine is easy to change. However, the software giant knows that a large percentage of users will not bother and will simply stay with the default, thus giving it an instant market share boost in the search engine space.

Google currently has almost half of the search engine advertising market share but it depends heavily on that income. Microsoft meanwhile has been looking for ways to diversify away from its traditional slow growing desktop Windows and Office businesses into faster online growth markets such as search engine marketing. The release of the final version of IE7 in a couple of months could be the beginning of that move and this could be the biggest challenge that Google has faced to date. I know in America is MSN quite popular, but from what I’ve experienced, almost every internet user I know from Europe prefer Google as default search engine, including me. This change wouldn’t affect Microsoft that much, just one more option in this roll-down menu as it’s in Firefox can’t be a big harm. We will see…