Oops, my link to the blog post was not parsed properly, here is the correct link:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did
BTW, Jeff Atwood has a blog post devoted to issues just like this one.
Another company (whom Mu$t remain nameless) ensured that versions of its operating system would not be released without first ensuring a competetor’s application wouldn’t run. Sorry - but that’s evil.
Well, shit, if you read that on slashdot, it must be true.
Who cares, seriously if search engines is a big concern for you than WAKE UP! There’s a lot of things wrong in our world that needs serious attention but some people think it more important which OS to use. Get a life.
The situation with Windows is completely different from that with Google.
Microsoft produces operating systems that are complete garbage these days, yet they are able to maintain their grip on the OS market because they already have a lead. That’s an abuse of their monopoly position.
On the other hand, Google cannot abuse its position in such a way. Remember when Cuil was released? Everybody was so excited about it and wanted to try it out. If they had actually managed to create a better search engine, everyone would have switched to it immediately.
That’s the difference between Microsoft’s monopoly and Google’s.
You were curious why people got armed up against Microsoft’s monopol on operation system (and office products).
And why this does not happen against the googolith of search enginges.
I guess it’s Microsoft is representing the capitalistic way of software development. And Google is representing the open source development, at least for a lot of people.
If this is true or not … I don’t know. But that’s my guess.
Jeff -
I’ve been using clusty for a while and like it for the most part (but that is not an endorsement in any way). I do wonder seriously about the efficacy of the entire web advertising model. Is there any hard evidence (independent, not produced by advertisers, advertising hosts, or advertising firms) suggesting a dollar spent on advertising yields more than a dollar in revenue?
- Lepto
You just got me to realise that I really never even try the other search engines… I’m a google zombie already 
Now, I went looking for a page that allows you to query several engines in one go and see the results side by side. So far I found http://www.searchrater.com/ which is an academic project that tries to assess the quality of the three big search engines (or, as you point out, the big one and the runners-up…). They don’t tell you which one is which, of course.
Glad to know my constant refreshing desperately looking for new questions isn’t causing the server any problems 
Can I just say, my favorite part of this post was your mention of how SEO really has a heavy technical leaning. I think SEO, like so many other three letter buzz words, continues to be misunderstood by the people who desire it.
This isn’t strange considering the alternatives are crap. I’ve seriously tried to use Live or Yahoo for a week but the results are literary useless.
Google is like a mindreader, i might remember some short phrase on a website i have visited and i want to find it again, i just type the phrase and google finds the page in the top 3 results.
On Live and Yahoo i can type the entire page-title and a full quote from the top of the page and i still have to go to page 3 to find the page i want.
It’s the monopsony, stupid. Google’s monopoly in search is only maintained by constant innovation on their part. (Microsoft’s monopoly was maintained, in part, by malfeasance, but mostly by the larger failings of their competitors.)
The problem with Google is that if you have ad space to sell, Google is virtually the only buyer. That is where the money is, that is where the problem is, and that is where the conflict will be when, inevitably, Google abuses that power.
Because it has trouble geting out of the bath?
Yes, google is Spiderman.
And as Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben says: With great power comes great responsibility.
Google is also the default in Firefox, and obviously, Chrome. Might be the default in Opera as well.
I think the telling point is that (a) it’s fairly simple to change the default, (b) the default is what most people want, and © if at some time, for some reason there was a better alternative, Google couldn’t stop Firefox/Opera from changing the default.
Michael C. Neel asks what would happen if you googled Microsoft Office. Well, instead of speculating, I actually did it. The first 4 entries went to Microsoft’s site. The 5th item was news results for microsoft office and the 6th was shopping results for microsoft office. Only after that did something else come up - a wikipedia entry about MS Office.
I also googled office. Google’s software did not appear above the fold, although MS’s, as well as some entries that are not software related.
This supports the idea that Google is not manually tweaking the rankings to favor itself.
@Andy Lee
The Photo is taken from Bansky, a British street artist. He has a whole series called The Elephant in the Room.
It wasn’t? When I got a laptop from Dell, google desktop and some kind of IE google toolbar were both preinstalled.
Google is also the default in Firefox, and obviously, Chrome. Might be the default in Opera as well.
The first comment by Andrew asks, what can we do? Here is your answer: http://farmdev.com/thoughts/71/googlebot-s-fatal-flaw-and-how-you-can-fix-it-or-get-rich-trying-/
I think many folks are missing the picture that Jeff is painting here. I agree that Google and Microsoft are very different beasts; furthermore, they developed their monopolies in very different manners. However, monopolies in and of themselves are not inherently evil; the evil lies in the potential for misuse.
From left field…
Let’s say I have a website that sells widgets, and I’m not the only seller of these widgets. When you Google for these widgets, my website is in the top three results; and I receive 83% of my traffic via Google searches for these widgets. Now let’s say that by some unhappy circumstance, I run over Larry Page’s puppy, accidentally, of course (… who doesn’t love puppies?); however Larry doesn’t see it that way. He thinks I’m the lowest of the low, and the monopoly he wields could be used to destroy me. How? One flag in the database, next to every record with my name on it, and www.mywidgets.com never shows up in a Google search again. I don’t know about others, but my company can’t survive on the 17% that’s left over, after my buyers go to the other company that Google displays when a search for widgets is performed.
And that’s the evil part. Not that Google engages in this kind of activity, but the potential is there.
A more realistic evil…
Google could bias searches toward products that Google favors because they receive bigger kickback through pay-per-click or advertising on those products. For example, (and this is completely hypothetical) it’s entirely possible that upon a search for spreadsheet, Google could remove MS Excel (Office) and Apple Numbers (iWork) from the results in order to push the 83% of the populace they influence to Google Docs. Not necessarily because Google wants people to use Google Docs (it’s not a product they sell), but because of some recent high-dollar deal for banner ads on the Google Docs pages.
Like I said, monopolies are not inherently evil; it’s the potential for evil in their misuse.
There are multiple differences between Google’s situation and that of Microsoft, many of which have been already noted in other comments.
But I think the biggest difference is a matter of timing. Google is still very new, it is not yet clear whether their monopoly position will last for decades or be ephemeral, and they are not yet doing a lot to irritate their customers.
However, they are making an effort to lock in their monopoly and weaken Microsoft’s (see Google Docs, Google mail, etc.)
In and of itself these tactics aren’t very troubling, but this can lead to a slippery slope and a lot of enemies, and/or legal problems a decade or so down the road.
My advice to Google would be to concentrate on Search, protecting your monopoly by being head and shoulders better than the competition, rather than spending so much time and energy on diversification efforts that aren’t making money and appear to be nothing more than ploys to lock in customers and weaken Microsoft.