Headline: Competitor without rival Search Engine Complains
Yeah, so the issue here is that Google's search engine is a PRIVATE service. They are under no obligation to provide search services, there is no government standard for providing search services, and they certainly aren't subsidized by the government.
WHY oh WHY does everyone complain about their listings in Google? Do any of those people pay Google for listings? NO. No one gets to pay Google for general listings. You can pay for sponsored results, but the listings that are free are determined solely by Google's proprietary algorithms.
How is Google abusing a service it gives out for free (free to both common consumers and businesses)? If Streetmap had paid for Ads, and Google was still promoting itself over those paid ads, that would probably be some violation of contract. But that's not what happened here.
Even Google can't promise your results are 100% accurate (it can't promise every website is indexed or that all returned results are complete and correct). So when those results don't match what you'd like them to, you can just sue Google?
Yes, Google has a dominant position on the internet, only because your common user is a complete moron. If you want Streetmaps, WHY do you GOOGLE it? Go directly to Streetmap's website, idiot! It reminds me of issues with spam filters. Legitimate newsletters get filtered as spam because people are too lazy to unsubscribe. They just keep clicking spam until the letters no longer show up. People don't know how to use the internet, so they just keep Googling things.
There was an episode of parks and recs where, in order to get to any URL, the guy goes to altavista.com and searches for the website. Apparently, this is how anyone wanting to find street directions in the UK using Streetmap operates.
If I go to Google and ask for directions, I assume I will get Google Maps results. If I wanted Map Quest or Bing results, I would go to THOSE websites. How can Streetmaps argue that people going to Google.com and asking for directions want Streetmaps' directions instead of Google's? And how is Google on the hook to provide someone else's results.
Next, Microsoft will argue that when people go to Google.com and search for a website, Google should be providing Bing results of that search instead of Google results. Because clearly people want Bing results, but are somehow forced to go to "google.com" to search for those results.
Firefox, Vivaldi, Edge/IE, and probably others are actually switching to have Bing be the default search engine (for whatever reason). So, if people are getting results from Google, you can't even blame the browser anymore. People want results from Google. Companies get upset when customers get results from Google. And somehow, this is Google's fault?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
