Taken in a vacuum, a fairly trivial thing happened a few days ago. The co-founder of Firefox, Blake Ross, wrote a post criticizing Google called “Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose“. He takes issue with a new Google search feature that promotes certain of their own products over organic search results. See Google searches for Calendar, Blogging, Photo Sharing and others and see Google pushing Google Calendar, Blogger and Picasa, respectively, above what is supposed to be the most relevant results - Google search. Even a search for Yahoo Calendar has these Google results above the obvious destination the user was searching for.I use Google all the time, though I'll admit there's a degree of suspicion in my heart about the folks at Google. They are hard-core leftists who hit the lottery of life and are now billionaires. They have pledged to use their new-found wealth to promote their "progressive" vision of life. That's their right. I just don't feel good about helping them along. That said, I'm spit in the ocean.
I say this is trivial incident taken in a vacuum because, quite frankly, Google has every right to promote their own products on their website. But I think Ross’ post may be a sign of a change in attitude towards Google that’s been percolating for the last year or so, and is beginning to manifest itself. The fact that a highly respected entrepreneur finally spoke out should be a wakeup call for Google.
The bigger question is whether there'll ever really be a movement away from the now deeply entrenched habit of typing "google.com". There are lots of search engines out there, and most will yield perfectly acceptable results. But "Google" has long since been seen as just "one of many" and is now pretty firmly viewed as "the" search engine.
Can they lose that monopoly? I tend to doubt it. Unless they do something particularly egregious. But it would have to be pretty bad.
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